Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh

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Collins, fool-hardily, as it turned out, appeared as a witness, giving testimony against alleged PIRA commander, Thomas 'Slab' Murphy, during a libel action against a British newspaper, shortly before his brutal murder. There seems to be no doubt from reading Bandit Country that the average squaddie in the British army or RUC viewed a posting to South Armagh with at least the same trepidation that current British troops view a posting to Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose.

I'll never forget the night Stephen Restorick was shot just round the corner from me or hearing the bomb explosion that killed Lord Justice Gibson and his wife. This book is a must read and if you are only to ever read one book on the situation in Northern Ireland, well this is it. ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up bandit country Patterson, James Conor More by this author.This point helpfully dispels the myth that the old IRA were good guys, completely unlike the modern Provisional movement. I have not spared the reader the horrors of what has happened and there are pictures of bodies and the aftermath of incidents that some people might find distressing. My copy originally belonged to my father, and then passed to my eager hands when I was 15 years old -- before, I'd had to read sneaky passages of it whenever I was in my parents' room for some rare, legitimate reason.

Spectres of characters both mythic and real thread through these poems, giving them a slippery, ghostly quality. Regretfully, one of his colleagues blamed Superintendent Buchanan's death on his belief in predestination, which, allegedly, meant that he did not take adequate precautions to avoid getting murdered. He tries to make the case that, even pre-partition, the Fewes area, which includes South Armagh, was quite a bellicose proposition for the British colonial invaders to conquer.While certainly not the intent of this pre-9/11 book, it was difficult not to draw loose parallels between the indigenous/occupier dynamic described in Northern Ireland and those the US is wrestling with in Afghanistan (the guerrilla's exploitation of popular support for insurgent propaganda and operational assistance; the insurgents' use of improvised munitions; questionable counterinsurgent legal procedures; the self-imposed isolation of counterinsurgent military forward bases; the roles of intelligence and counterintelligence; etc). Famously described as 'Bandit Country' by Merlyn Rees when he was Northern Ireland Secretary, for nearly three decades South Armagh was the most dangerous posting in the world for a British soldier.

Many commentators and authors, (although in fairness, probably not Harnden) fail to really comprehend why the 'Queen's Writ' is not warmly received, in much of Ireland, for very real historical reasons.It's interesting information and seems very well sourced and accurate, but somewhat of a dense read. lots of descriptions of violence, bombings, attacks and counter attacks that went on in the last 25 years in South of Armagh of "Northern Ireland" by the police, British Army, IRA, UVF (a little) and other groups. In 2002, World of Books Group was founded on an ethos to do good, protect the planet and support charities by enabling more goods to be reused. Which is a fair enough scorecard for any national liberation organization, combined with the media-generated, notoriety of South Armagh.

Toby Harnden has stripped away the myth and propaganda associated with South Armagh to produce one of the most compelling and important books of the Troubles.Collins had at one time been the chief Provisional IRA 'intelligence officer' in the nearby city of Newry but had agreed to turn Queen's Evidence, aka Supergrass, against his former comrades. First, although it's a gripping read and each paragraph seems to follow from the previous one, on a chapter-by-chapter scale it's a bit disorganized. Here Kevin Traynor studies if the area has managed to embrace the Good Friday agreement as the rest of Northern Ireland has, or whether a legacy of the conflict still lingers with a sense of paranoia and suspicion. It was sobering to read the respective ages of the various British soldiers killed by the Provos in South Armagh, many of them barely a little older than 18 or 19. Captures in a dispassionate, detailed and intelligent manner the role of South Armagh (not just the South Armagh PIRA) in the conflict of the past thirty years and before.