Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh

Product Information

lots of descriptions of violence, bombings, attacks and counter attacks that went on in the last 25 years in South of Armagh of "Northern Ireland" by the police, British Army, IRA, UVF (a little) and other groups.

Dust Jackets are not guaranteed and when still present, they will have various degrees of tear and damage.However, its worth finding a copy as its one of the best books about the troubles and the stories of South Armagh are incredibly interesting.

Drawing on secret documents and interviews on South Armagh’s recent history, Harnden told the inside story of how the IRA came close to bringing the British state to its knees.While certainly not the intent of this pre-9/11 book, it was difficult not to draw loose parallels between the indigenous/occupier dynamic described in Northern Ireland and those the US is wrestling with in Afghanistan (the guerrilla's exploitation of popular support for insurgent propaganda and operational assistance; the insurgents' use of improvised munitions; questionable counterinsurgent legal procedures; the self-imposed isolation of counterinsurgent military forward bases; the roles of intelligence and counterintelligence; etc). Miriam Daly grew up in Dublin in the South-East of Ireland, attended University College Dublin (UCD) as both an undergraduate and then a postgraduate student, and subsequently became a member of the academic staff, lecturing in Economic History. The book essentially details the IRA's campaign of bombings, shootings and abductions and the war of attrition being fought against the British Army over the period.

This book purports to be critical reading for anyone wanting to “understand Northern Ireland and the knife-edge stumble along the precipice to peace. The author provides numerous accounts from former serving members of the British Army and RUC confirming that, due to the level of threat from the Provisional IRA in South Armagh, they only left the likes of the heavily fortified Crossmaglen barracks by helicopter and even the garbage bins had to be emptied by the same method. He had been arrested following an IRA mortar attack on the RUC barracks in Newry, which spectacularly wiped out nine of the paramilitary police force's members. Collins eventually retracted from his deal with the prosecution and was later acquitted of all charges, after the Diplock (no jury) trial judge, Higgins, accepted that Collins had been mistreated. A Very British Jihad", published on Kindle in 2019, was a groundbreaking expose of state-sanctioned murder in the North of Ireland.It reads like a forensic historical analysis, yet, the subject it addresses, in Irish political terms, could not be more contemporary. It's impossible to cram all the history and all the events into a digestible format and the author did a fantastic job of laying out the history, the characters and the sequence of events from the 1970's to the Good Friday agreement.