The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

One can certainly argue that all’s fair in love and war and that the Provisionals’ fire had to be met with fire. No one can excuse IRA atrocities such as the Enniskillen bombing of November 1987, which killed eleven innocent civilians and injured sixty-three more; the wiping-out of the entire Hanna family, all Protestants, in July 1988, by a bomb-blast; the planting of a bomb in a Shankill Road fish shop in October 1993, which killed ten shoppers and one of the bombers and injured scores of other people. But there is another side to the coin. The British, after all, had one power denied to the IRA, the UDA, the Unionists, the SDLP and the Dublin Government: the power of initiative. In the event, they chose to exert this, not with a view to seeking a political solution, but with an eye on the Unionist MPs’ effect on the parliamentary balance at Westminster. From the fall of the power-sharing executive of 1974 until the IRA ceasefire of 1994, Britain presided over a political vacuum that spawned a violent degeneracy not seen elsewhere in western Europe since the ending of World War II.