The IRA: They’re Not Quite Dead Yet, Apparently

Adrian McKinty suggested over on Detectives Beyond Borders last week that Martin McGuinness’s autobiography, if it ever appears, will be a key text for anyone planning to write the great post-Troubles Northern Ireland novel. In the meantime, Anthony McIntyre’s GOOD FRIDAY: THE DEATH OF IRISH REPUBLICANISM, published last week, is as authentic an IRA voice as you’ll need – not that we’re suggesting, of course, that Martin McGuinness had anything at all to do with the IRA, ever.
  Anyhoo, Liam Clarke wrote about the book yesterday in the Sunday Times, under the headline ‘Why the IRA lost its long and futile battle’, with snippets running thusly:

  “Last week McIntyre trumped him with a tome entitled THE DEATH OF IRISH REPUBLICANISM, published as the Irish and British governments commissioned a report from the International Monitoring Commission (IMC), designed to ascertain if the IRA army council is still in existence. The fact that they need to ask, and need three weeks to consider the evidence and weigh up the reported sightings, speaks for itself …

  “McIntyre, a former IRA commander who served 18 years for murder and then did a PhD in republican history, is right. The Provisional IRA — and the army council that plotted its campaign — is on its death bed. It may thrash around like a headless chicken for a few years, but it is past reviving. If the IRA ever re-emerges, it will be a new organisation with new people …

  “McIntyre paints a picture of a republican leadership who were reformists from the outset, being secretly protected, groomed and eventually steered into Stormont by the British forces they claimed to be fighting. All the while, a supine membership cheered them on from the sidelines, easily fooled by symbolism and rhetoric …

  “To his credit, McIntyre doesn’t dodge this awkward dilemma: “The major question historians will ask is not why the republicans surrendered, but why they fought such a futile long war,” he writes. “It has not been unconditional surrender. And it has been infinitely better than continuing to fight a futile war for the sake of honouring Ireland’s dead, yet producing only more of them. But let us not labour under any illusions that the conditions were good.”

  It’s a terrific piece, and well worth reading in full.

Happiness Is The New Black

Grilled by Mick Heaney in yesterday’s Irish edition of The Sunday Times (no interweb link, sadly), John Banville (right) plugged THE SILVER SWAN by waxing lyrical – in suitably gloomy modernist fashion, natch – about the conflicts inherent in writing crime fiction under his nom de plume of Benny Blanco, aka Benjamin Black, to wit:

For one thing, these days Banville is revelling in the freedom afforded by his guise as a crime novelist. “On the brink of old age, I’m suddenly having fun,” he says. “I didn’t realise writing novels as so easy until I became Benjamin Black – you just sit there and make it up as you go along. I mean, John Banville will work on a sentence for half a day; Benjamin just goes, ‘Bugger it, that’ll do.’”

Nice to see Banville mellowing out last, eh? Erm, not quite …

“I needed to take a serious break from what I was doing,” he says. “The road I was on was too straight, and I had to take a side road. The John Banville book I’m doing at the moment will be slightly different because of Benjamin Black. The difference will be minimal but significant. I had to stop writing in the first person and start writing, as Beckett would say, in the last person. I needed a change.”

Okay. But surely now, with two Quirke novels under his belt, the crime fiction world is his oyster with Guinness chasers, right? Nope …

“Somehow, that genre doesn’t allow for humour. And that, if anything, would drive me away from crime fiction. It’s all so bloody gloomy and deterministic. And it’s because everything is moving towards a denouement, towards a close. Life is funny because there is no end to it, it’s an open joke. But crime fiction is not like life – it can’t be, because everything is going to be explained at the end. And that doesn’t happen.”

Laugh? We almost emigrated. Still, there is some good news, folks – Banville / Black “has already completed a third Benjamin Black novel, to be serialised in the New York Times, which took him six weeks to write …”. Six weeks, according to our crude calculations, being roughly what it takes John Banville to write an entire paragraph. Ah well, quality over quantity every time, eh ? What’s that? You want it good and fast? Bloody peons …

Doctors Differ, Patients Die

Two interesting front-page stories from recent days, people. Monday’s Irish Times led with a story from political editor Stephen Collins, which runneth thusly:

Archbishop calls for action on crime as three die
"One of the country’s leading churchmen has described the spate of violent crime as close to a national emergency and has called on the Government to devise a new strategy to deal with the problem."

Not what you might call a good news story. Except the previous day’s Sunday Times (Irish edition) front page ran a piece from Mark Tighe and Tom Gordon that suggests ‘national emergency’ might be a little wide of the mark, to wit:

Don’t look now, but you’re in Europe’s safest country
"As surveys go it seems to fly in the face of reality, but figures to be released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) show that Ireland is the least violent country in Europe."

Which is a bit more serious than potayto / potahto, no? Anyone have any suitably wacky theories as to the discrepancy? We’re all ears …