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'Bandit Country': The IRA and South Armagh

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There’s no way in 1986 you could have foreseen where we are now because it was helicopters, it was the army, it was horrible, people were getting killed. Given the level of detail on various operations - successful and unsuccessful - one can't help but marvel at the sheer scale of the inventiveness and determination that a small group of individuals could display in the face of Empire, regardless of how one feels on the political or moral logic of the armed campaign. In a thriller you obviously need your good guys and you need your bad guys. Knowing that the author of Bandit Country is an Englishman, living in England during the time of 'the troubles' and therefore absorbing things the way the English press reported them, you should have no problem knowing who the bad guys in this story will be.

While there is a police presence – “they would regularly be up at the church with speed guns” – it’s unlike other areas, he says.Hands Across the Divide by sculptor Maurice Harron, in Derry, Northern Ireland. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

You go through your life and think, ‘ah that’s not really having any effect on me’ and then I had my own issues obviously,” McConville says. As the last of the British military watchtowers in south Armagh, its removal was regarded as hugely symbolic. Darran Anderson understands only too well the importance that a sense of place like this has. As a writer and academic from Derry, Anderson’s focus has tended toward psychogeography in general and architecture in particular. In 2016 he published Imaginary Cities, an excellent study into the history of planned urban centres that never came into being. People have this image of what goes on in Cross and obviously certain aspects have fed into that over the years with criminality. It is a story that covers many aspects of IRA, The Real IRA, Sinn Fein and also the thoughts and feelings of the people on the streets. The mistrust, the distrust and the fear to hope things will actually change for the best as well as showing the frustrations of the dissidents at grass root level.An engaging and revealing book on the modus operandi and spectacular armed capabilities of the South Armagh Brigade of the Provisional IRA, which might be, on a pound-for-pound basis, perhaps the peak 'domestic' 'terrorist' grouping of all time (i.e. excluding para-state factions like the Tamil Tigers, ISIS or the PLO that essentially operated in de facto sovereign or 'liberated' territory). I recently finished Fishers of Men and Undercover War. They told so much more about the UC work done to combat a violent insurgency. But still, only one side so to speak. Yet the presence of Crossmaglen’s sprawling high-fenced police station with its reinforced concrete walls and cameras – PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne likened it to a “relic from the Cold War” – is a constant reminder of the past amid peacetime progress. From a point of history it is interesting to read how troubled this period was and how much things seem to have moved on...I think a further book must exist somewhere which may shine a light on how far divisions have been healed as it seems incredulous to think that things are now chunky dory as the separations between community's ran deep at times through the period recorded.

Sniper at Work” road signs with silhouettes of gunmen are gone and an occasional police car patrols a town where soldiers and police only ever travelled by helicopter for fear of being blown up by covert bombs. urn:oclc:262886039 Republisher_date 20180328134526 Republisher_operator [email protected] Republisher_time 737 Scandate 20180317105243 Scanner ttscribe25.hongkong.archive.org Scanningcenter hongkong Tts_version v1.58-final-5-g8c4c1bd Worldcat (source edition) Andrew is a former journalist who has always had a love of writing and a passion for reading good thrillers. Now he has finally put the two interests together.At times an uncomfortable read at times but one which in many ways is fascinating...it tells the tale of the modern troubles from the period of the seventies through to a then shaky peace deal as we entered the millennium. Writers on the Belfast Agreement: Michael Longley, Jan Carson, Michelle Gallen, Neil Hegarty and more reflect on 25 years of change ] South Armagh, for those not in the know, is a rural location which saw a decades long battle between the PIRA and the British Army who, depending on your point of view, were either invaders continuing an imperialist agenda or people simple defending their fellow countrymen. I remember we started to be successful at the football and going into him one day, and he says, ‘this is brilliant, we’ll no longer be known as bandit country, we’ll be known for the football we play’.

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