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REVIEW ESSAY

‘An alien ideology’: Cold War perceptions of the Irish Republican Left

John Mulqueen, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 275 pp. + index

Pages 375-379 | Published online: 27 Apr 2021
 

Notes

1 Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster, 2nd ed. (Belfast: Blackstaff Press Ltd, 1992).

2 Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (London: Macmillan, 2003).

3 Adrian Guelke, Northern Ireland: The International Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989).

4 See my ‘Bringing in the “International”: the IRA Ceasefire and the End of the Cold War’, International Affairs 73, no. 4 (1997): 671–93; ‘Northern Ireland: the War that came in from the Cold’, Irish Studies in International Affairs 9 (1998): 73–84; and ‘Cinderella at the Ball: Explaining the End of the War in Northern Ireland’, Millennium 27, no. 2 (1998): 325–42.

5 At a meeting on 30 October 1997, Tony Blair was told by Sir Stephen Lander, then Director-General of MI5, that it had in fact been its success in limiting the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign in the early 1990s that had helped bring an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Blair was also informed that key figures in the republican leadership now seemed ‘prepared to consider a settlement which stops short of a united Ireland’. See ‘Security Service: MI5ʹ. Professor Christopher Andrew, ‘Since the Cold War’. Available online: https://www.mi5.gov.uk/since-the-cold-war.

6 For a systematic academic critique of my argument, see Paul Dixon, ‘Northern Ireland and the International Dimension: The End of the Cold War, the USA and European Integration’, Irish Studies in International Affairs 13 (2002): 105–20.

7 For the definitive study on how the Irish state has addressed threats to its security see Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

8 See also Paul Wylie, Ireland and the Cold War: Diplomacy and Recognition, 1949–1963 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006).

9 The Irish Times, 2 January 2004.

10 Ed Carty, ‘The Soviet Union “Was Ready to Exploit IRA” in Cold War’, The Scotsman, 27 December 2013.

11 Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: the Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

12 Ray O’Hanlan, ‘KGB Armed Official IRA, Book Reveals’, IrishEcho, 16 February 2011.

13 Peter Pringle, ‘KGB approved 1m Pounds Aid Request by Party with IRA Link’, Independent, 22 October 2011.

14 Maurice J. Casey, ‘A Convenient Stick with which to Beat the West’. Available online: http://www.academia.edu/28658415/.

15 ‘Howe “Astounded” when Soviet Counterpart Raised Case of IRA Prisoners in the North’, Irish News, 30 December 2015.

16 See, for example, Scott Millar and Brian Hanley, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2009).

17 John Mulqueen, ‘“We Serve neither Queen nor Commissar”: the Birth of the Provisional IRA’, The Irish Times, 27 January 2020.

18 Sean Mac Stiofain, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London: Gordon Cremonesi, 1975).

19 Kevin Cullen, ‘America and the Conflict’. Available online: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ira/reports/america.html.

20 According to one report, Margaret Thatcher ‘only approved’ this ‘controversial phrase … after the end of the cold war’. She had in fact been ‘reluctant to use such neutral language … earlier because British nuclear submarines passed close to Ireland to patrol the Atlantic’. Quoted in Nicholas Watt, ‘Thatcher Gave Approval to Talks with IRA’, The Guardian, 16 October 1999.

21 See ‘How 9/11 gave the IRA an Exit Route from “War”’, Belfast Telegraph, 6 September 2001; and Amanda Sloat, ‘Horror at the 9/11 Attacks Contributed to Peace in Northern Ireland’, Brookings, 11 September 2020.

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