cover image We Wrecked the Place: Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles

We Wrecked the Place: Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles

Jonathan Stevenson. Free Press, $24.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-82745-2

""We blew up London, we blew up Belfast, we wrecked the place. Now we're back to where we started,"" says a former IRA gunman quoted here. The author focuses on the conflict in Northern Ireland through the eyes of ""the men and women who did most of the killing"" as he interviews 14 nationalists and 17 loyalists. First he takes a detailed look at Irish history, progressing from Cromwell and William of Orange to the famine and the Rising of 1916, up to the present Troubles. Stevenson analyzes this ""Beirut-style conflict"" and many of its causes and effects: ""Bloody Sunday"" in 1972; the Bobby Sands hunger strike and the Anglo-Irish accord of 1985. He examines the problems inside the Protestant community: the division between the middle and the working classes as well as the Protestant movement fostering an independent Northern Ireland. He also considers the personalities: Ian Paisley, who always ""managed to rouse loyalist violence without getting his hands dirty"" and Gerry Adams's ""shameless hypocrisy""--although he admires how Adams has put the IRA on the political path, i.e., taken the gun out of Irish politics. Stevenson, an American freelance writer living in Belfast, has written a complicated and interesting book about a seemingly hopeless political quagmire. (Nov.)