Northern Ireland (merged thread)

[davidbfpo]

A wider commentary on Brexit and Northern Ireland has this stunning passage, with my emphasis:

As its 20th anniversary looms within weeks, after all, the agreement is not functioning, with neither the Northern Ireland assembly and executive nor the North-South Ministerial Council in being.
Indeed, what remains is the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Ironically, this is because policing was so difficult an issue in the talks leading to the agreement—going as it did, as with the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, to the heart of the contest over the state—that it was passed to an impartial independent commission to solve. Informed by the region’s human-rights lobby born of the ‘troubles’, the consequent Patten report led to the old, overwhelmingly Protestant and ‘securitised’ Royal Ulster Constabulary being transformed into a police service founded on human-rights principles and committed to neighbourhood policing. Far from adequate, it is however the one institution—despite the still hugely controversial nature of Northern Ireland’s decades of lead—still standing.

Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/bre...day-agreement?

[davidbfpo]

A rare public comment by a former PIRA volunteer on the success of British intelligence infiltration; he ends with:

They didn’t come out and say that they were penetrated. Yes, the IRA volunteers knew there was penetration, as that was par for the course, but I don’t believe the volunteers on the ground knew the extent of the penetration, and to a large extent the leadership concealed the level of penetration from them.

Link:https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/cr...ltar-1-8402927

[davidbfpo]

An excellent article on the history of informants after the Haggerty case and trial recently (see previous posts).
Link:https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...get-away-with?

[davidbfpo]

There have been 158 "security-related" deaths in Northern Ireland since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, according to independent research. The majority of the deaths were murders carried out by republican and loyalist paramilitaries, who mostly targeted victims within their own communities....up until April of this year, republican paramilitaries were responsible for 74 deaths while loyalist paramilitaries were responsible for 71....There have been 68 Catholic civilians killed - 38 have been the victims of republican organisations operating within those same communities. "There's a further 22 who have been killed by loyalists and then two where attribution is not possible....But, in total, 41 loyalist paramilitaries have been killed. Every single one of them has been killed by other loyalist paramilitaries.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-43862294?

[davidbfpo]

Transparency of sorts after a legal action:

Police have agreed to release a secret special branch report on agent-handling during the Troubles that allegedly protected paramilitary informants from arrest. The 1980 report, drawn up by the senior MI5 officer Sir Patrick Walker, is believed to have established agent-handling practices that have since been widely criticised as prioritising intelligence-gathering over other concerns.
The Walker report was commissioned to improve intelligence penetration of paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland when IRA activity was high.

Link:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...rt-informants?

[davidbfpo]

A short article, summarising a new book, and the full title of the article is 'Counter-Insurgency Against Kith and Kin’: British Army Combat and Cohesion in Northern Ireland'. The focus is on the early years:

During my research for a book on small unit cohesion in Northern Ireland – comparing operational watchkeepers’ log-books, other unit reports and interviewing soldiers who served in Northern Ireland during the exceptionally violent years of 1971-1973 – I observed that the Army would often use hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of rounds of ammunition, in exchanges of fire with IRA units along the border.

A reminder how bloody that period was for the British Army:

the British Army suffered more operational fatalities in one year – 134 in 1972 – than in any year during the recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Link:https://defenceindepth.co/2018/05/07...thern-ireland/

The book is actually titled 'An Army of Tribe: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland' and the author Edward Burke is a Professor at Nottingham University.

A link to the book publisher's website found in the summary:

The central argument of this book is that British Army small infantry units enjoyed considerable autonomy during the early years of Operation Banner and could behave in a vengeful, highly aggressive or benign and conciliatory way as their local commanders saw fit. The strain of civil-military relations at a senior level was replicated operationally as soldiers came to resent the limitations of waging war in the UK.

Link to UK option:https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/108172

Published in the USA in August 2018:https://global.oup.com/academic/prod...cc=us&lang=en&

[davidbfpo]

A wide-ranging review by a UK academic familiar with the issues, so a few sentences:

On an autumn evening in late October 1972, Michael Naan was working on his isolated farm a few miles from the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic with Andrew Murray, a young hired laborer, when they were set upon, beaten, and stabbed to death.
In his fascinating new book, An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland, Ed Burke explores why these soldiers committed the murders and what consequences their actions had for the local community. Burke places the actions of the soldiers in two overlapping contexts — the institutional framework of the British Army and the historical environment in which they found themselves deployed.
An Army of Tribes is a rigorous work of painstaking scholarship that places the security dimension of the Northern Irish Troubles in much greater tactical and operational context than ever before. In assessing the micro-ethics of soldiering in such a local setting, Burke also provides us with a rich glimpse into how military operations shaped strategy, and vice versa.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2018/05/wh...urn-to-murder/