Bloody Ulster

by A.J. Barker

8vo size softcover

Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Lieutenant Colonel Arthur James Barker served as a regular infantry officer in the British Army from 1936 to 1958. Since leaving the Army he has written a number of books on military history, as well as numerous technical articles dealing with weapons, tactics and equipment.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox]

An unusual, and unusually informative, look at the Troubles in Northern Ireland from the perspective of military history. The political history is here, of course, from the arrival of the Vikings to Cromwell's sweep of the Irish countryside, ethnic cleansing we would say today, to King Billy, Partition, the Irish Civil War and the failed creation of the Protestant majority Six Counties. Of greater interest is Barker's inventory of weapons: The IRA and the sub-machine gun versus British Army Personnel Carriers. A war of pistols on one side and tear gas on the other. Chilling and all true.

[George Kasnic]

This book turned out to over perform my expectations. Ballantine books tend to be Anglo-centric and I expected this to be heavily slanted. In this case I misinterpreted the expected bias, which was based on the view of all in Ulster as non-English. Surprisingly this led to a balanced and sometimes brutally honest review of the history of Ireland. This considered approach held even through the Easter Rising and up to the Stormont era.

The wheels came off the narrative with the increasing British Army intervention in the 70’s. Remembering that the writers are WWII vets, they could not bring themselves to critically examine the actions of the Army, including an appalling rationalization of the shooting of a group of teenagers during a protest. This detracted from the book which was probably rushed to publication to take advantage of sales potential as the strife continued. The authors basically throw up their hands at the end concluding the problems insoluble.

A stunning omission in this book, especially for the publisher, is the lack of maps. No maps, none. A map of Ireland, nope. A map showing where Ulster fits, nope. A map of some of the historic military campaigns on the island, nope. A map of landholdings, of population, of emigration, nope. A map of the different enclaves in Ulster which feature in the end chapters, nope. Without these maps, the impact of the narrative is blunted.

The authors do stumble around the underlying cause of all this without saying it (they probably don’t realize it, or seeing themselves as outsiders - don’t care.). This is an economic conflict, much like Palestinian, based on land, the theft of land, and economic power, in this case delineated along religious lines - religious lines barely discernible among Christians and impenetrable to other religions. But in the end it is an economic conflict.

[RA]

1973 overview and "updating" of the Irish conflict(s), up to the bloodletting of 1969-1972. Good, basic information.

[Russell R]

another good Ballantine book