Books
The Secret War: an account of the sinister activities along the border involving Gardai, RUC, British Army and SAS
Patsy McArdle (Mercier Press, Dublin 1984)
McArdle is a journalist with Downtown Radio in Northern Ireland. Journalists sometimes write really good books, but McArdle’s is a stinker, little more than a jumbled collection of recycled press clippings. Which is a pity because the subject of the book is of real significance.
What McArdle has failed to do is document any of the claims he makes. There are no sources and no index. And with material as tricky as SAS assassination squads, for example, documentation, even if it is scanty, is essential.
Instead of documentation we get stuff like this (taken from p69 after opening the book at random). The emphases are mine.
Discussing the murder of one Eamon McMahon, McArdle says:
“McMahon, a debonair type, was a Republican from a fiercely Nationalist family. He was generally recognised as a shadowy paramilitary activist by the security forces. He had identified himself with the IRA in South Armagh in the early 1970s, but in later years he was involved with the INLA. He was questioned on a variety of occasions by the British Army and RUC and detained for varying periods under the Emergency Provisions Act in Northern Ireland. He was excluded from Britain under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. All three factors would appear to indicate pro British involvement in the killing. There is also the likelihood that McMahon’s companion was murdered because he knew the killers from their accents or the circumstances in which their car was stopped on the roadway.”
Well, yes, maybe. But life is more complicated than that (especially in Northern Ireland). The fact that X is a(n apparent) supporter/member of the IRA/INLA in itself says nothing about who killed X. And, as if to acknowledge this, having elaborated this framework of probability, McArdle promptly adds that:
“some of McMahon’s close friends have since maintained he was the victim of ruthless elements whose wrath he incurred in the handling of cash some weeks before he and Mackin were murdered.”
Which leaves us where? And the whole book is like that: supposition, probability – what someone once named ‘the apparently syndrome’. ‘Apparently there was this SAS patrol on the scene..a giant pink UFO..apparently there were 6 gunmen playing checkers on the Grassy Knoll’.
There is one final thing worth mentioning. On p62 there is a new (to me) euphemism for ‘fuck off’. I think Norman Mailer coined the most famous, ‘fug’, in his The Naked and the Dead. McArdle offers us ‘feck off’. I don’t read enough Irish material to know if this is an original, but the fact that a book describing a whole catalogue of alleged British ‘secret war’ activities from assassinations down can’t just print ‘fuck’ says quite a lot about the cultural climate in the Republic of Ireland, does it not?
Reading ‘feck off’ my sympathy for those in Northern Ireland who don’t want a united Ireland went up a notch. Feck the Pope! (Especially this one)
RR