Book Review: ‘Living with Ghosts’ offers a limited view of the so-called dirty war

Brian Rowan worked as security correspondent for the BBC in Belfast from the end of the 1980s until 2005. According to the former Sinn Fein publicity director, Danny Morrison, Rowan established a reputation for breaking news stories, particularly for exclusives on IRA GHQ claims of responsibility for major operations and later during the peace process, IRA leadership policy statements. He was the go-to journalist for P.O’Neill, the IRA’s official spokesman. .

Perhaps the IRA chose Brian Rowan because, although he could be critical of their actions, his framing of the violence as a ‘dirty war’ that had its origins in the sickness of society in Northern Ireland and in which all sides bore their share of responsibility, was congenial to republicans’ own narrative of the Troubles. For Rowan, part of what he refers to as ‘the filth of the Troubles ‘ was the state’s running of agents within terrorist organisations.

The book refers in particular to Brian Nelson who became the UDA’s chief intelligence officer and Freddie Scappaticci, the Army’s ‘golden egg’ within the Provisionals’ internal security team, according to Sir John Wilsey, General Officer Commanding (GOC) at the time.

After Nelson had been jailed on five counts of conspiracy to murder in 1992 Rowan interviewed Wilsey and relates the ‘banana skin’ question he asked the GOC: had the army felt any shame? Wilsey’s reply that he was certainly not ashamed seemed to Rowan at the time crass – ‘a typical jingoistic general’. However, he now claims that Wilsey’s response makes more sense due to his later discovery that in the late 1980s the Thatcher government had set as its main military objective the destruction of PIRA.

Nowhere in the book is this claim sourced. In fact all the available archival evidence and serious analyses of British state strategy argue against it. Those interested in the sharp intensification of violence in the 1986-89 period will have a better guide in the report by Sir Desmond de Silva on his Review of the murder of Patrick Finucane.

According to de Silva the greatest factor behind the increase in violence was a spike in IRA attacks after the successful importation of arms from Libya in the mid 1980s. The Provisionals killed 37 in 1986, 58 in 1987, 66 in 1988 and 53 in 1989.

In response to this there was a more pronounced intelligence-led military response to the IRA. British strategy was not aimed at the destruction of the IRA – something long considered impossible – but rather on one front trying to enter into dialogue with the IRA leadership while at same time deploying a more hard-edged security based response against IRA units.

In the words of the historical adviser to De Silva, Professor Richard English, the British state "saw these different strands of approach as complementary rather than contradictory”. British strategy was the painful constraint of the Provisionals not their defeat. Twenty six Provisionals died violently in 1987-88 and one estimate quoted by De Silva is that the IRA killed 59 of its own members for allegedly being agents. This dual strategy of attrition of the IRA’s capacity while holding out the possibility of including republicans in the political process after a cessation of violence was the key to what was soon to be labelled the peace process.

The book’s misunderstanding of British strategy leads to an overemphasis on innovatory thinking on the part of republicans who are depicted as leading the way to peace as opposed to unionist recalcitrance and the slow learners of the British state.

Rowan’s denunciation of the intelligence war is combined with the claim that it did not save lives. In contrast de Silva gives this judgement: "I am satisfied that the running of agents in terrorist organisations was one of the most effective methods by which the state forces could frustrate terrorist activity and save lives.”

This is a memoir of doing a job that inevitably meant close contact with those deeply involved in planning, executing and justifying paramilitary violence. It took its mental and emotional toll. Rowan was offered counselling by his boss at the BBC after witnessing the results of one particularly grisly IRA killing of three of its members who were alleged agents.

After relating a recent conversation with the former P O’Neill he comments: “None of us came through the conflict experience without damage.”

If the ‘us’ is all who lived through the Troubles then some groups, communities and areas were much more damaged than others. It is also necessary to make a distinction between those who might now claim to be damaged but played an active role in damaging others and the vast majority of those killed and injured who had done no damage to anyone.

Rowan is dismissive of the government’s legacy bill, although he does support an amnesty. His own legacy proposal is an internationally chaired conference involving all the players to last as long as necessary to produce ‘statements of acknowledgment’ and means of delivering information to families.

Given the unlikelihood of more than a tiny number of prosecutions let alone convictions, why paramilitary organisations would be prepared to provide details of the planning and execution of killings is not explained.

In another part of the book he points to the continued existence of the IRA’s Army Council and its jealously guarded ‘corporate memory’ of its role in the Troubles.

Given the central importance attached by the current leadership of the republican movement to depicting its campaign as an inevitable and largely just response to discrimination and state violence we can expect little more than the self-serving and exculpatory narratives.

The origin of his proposals on legacy come from meetings of former paramilitaries and current or former members of the security forces Rowan has chaired. He mentions one in particular which involved Martin McGuinness and the chief constable of the PSNI, George Hamilton, during the West Belfast Festival. What of interest either said is not recorded but in another interview the chief constable referred to a potentially more productive legacy mechanism.

In the RTE documentary, ‘Collusion’, Hamilton claimed his understanding was that the IRA, UVF and other terrorist groups did not take notes and minutes of meetings whilst the police did. That had meant that there had been a one-sided focus on alleged transgressions of the RUC.

Hamilton said he would like to transfer to the Historical Investigations Unit the police’s ‘vault’ of information on Troubles murders. It contains millions of documents with much information not only on the plans and actions of the RUC but also on republican and loyalist terrorists.

Like much of what is produced on the legacy of the Troubles by ngos, law firms and transitional justice academics, the book ignores the role that historians can play. The short-sighted cross-party rejection of the government’s legacy bill threatens the most sensible proposal within it: to open all the British state’s archives for the Troubles period to a panel of historians tasked with producing an official history.

As Rowan points out the current framing of Troubles violence through the lens of collusion is, to say the least, a distortion of reality. Unfortunately the book does little to correct the balance. De Silva’s Review was an example of the potential of a comprehensive, archive-based approach involving a trained historian. Thus although the focus of the Review was an examination of the British state and its agents, Sir Desmond commented that "I have no doubt that PIRA was the single greatest source of violence in the period and that a holistic account of the late 1980s in Northern Ireland would reveal the full calculating brutality of that terrorist grouping.”

For all the author’s clear revulsion at the brutalities of the Provisionals campaign, the book does little to challenge the republican movement’s astounding success in persuading a large section of nationalist Ireland that there was no alternative to its terrorist campaign .

• Henry Patterson is emeritus professor of Irish politics at the University of Ulster and author of Ireland’s Violent frontier: The Border and Anglo-Irish Relations During the Troubles