The Green Ribbon Books

Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair

Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding
Andre Deutsch
1999

In 1997, MI5 officer David Shayler went public with a series of damning criticisms of the Security Service. With this book, Hollingsworth and Fielding took Shayler's story as the starting point for a survey of the organisation as a whole.

At the time, Shayler's primary grievance was with what he saw as MI5 incompetence, and the two journalists were particularly impressed by his refusal to indulge in wild conspiracy theories, or to reveal details of  ongoing operations' or agents' identities.

His more recent bizarre behaviour is obvious ammunition for his critics, but arguably only enhances the importance of this book as an exposition of his original views.

The Squad and the Intelligence Operations of Michael Collins

T Ryle Dwyer
Mercier Press
2005

Historian T. Ryle Dwyer has written several studies of Michael Collins and the War of Independence. In this book, he re-examines the subject in the light of new material from the Bureau of Military History.

Dwyer stitches together these first-hand acccounts from members of 'the squad' into a coherent narrative of Collins' activities as the IRA's director of intelligence.

One thing this reader found striking was how closely Collins methods conformed to the theories of US military strategist John Boyd, which emphasise cutting an opponent off from their environment, and paralysing their ability to make effective decisions.

The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism

Robert Kee
Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1972
Penguin 2000

A widely read history of Irish nationalism, that has been published both as an omnibus, and as three separate volumes: The Most Distressful Country, the Bold Fenian Men and Ourselves Alone.

In the opening chapters, Kee surveys the Medieval and early modern background to Irish history. The bulk of the book, however, consists of a sustained narrative of the years from the rise of the United Irishmen in the late Eighteenth Century to the Civil War of 1922-23, an eventful period which included the Act of Union, the struggle first for Catholic emancipation, and then for Home Rule, the Great Famine and the Land War, the emergence of the Fenians, the War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish Treaty that created the modern Irish state.

Kee concludes with an epilogue which considers events up to the time of writing, during the earliest and most intense years of the Northern Troubles. It's clear thoughout that his sympathy is with constitutional nationalism and the Home Rule movement, rather than with the republican tradition. Nevertheless, The Green Flag is an obvious choice for anyone looking for a well-written narrative history of the period.

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Stalker: Ireland, 'Shoot to Kill' and the 'Affair'

John Stalker
Penguin
1988

The story of an honest cop who did his job too well and paid the price.

In October 1982, an IRA landmine killed three RUC officers in Co. Armagh. In the following two months, a special RUC squad shot dead six men, giving rise to accusations that the force was operating a "shoot to kill" policy.

In 1984, John Stalker, the high-flying Deputy Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police was appointed to investigate the killings. This is his own account of the extraordinary events that followed.

Big Boys' Rules: The SAS and the Secret Struggle Against the IRA

Mark Urban
Faber & Faber
1992

An influential account of the covert struggle between the security forces and the IRA.

Big Boys' Rules includes a neat diagram at the back of the book which details the evolution, through the 1970s and 80s, of Army and RUC covert units in the areas of surveillance, agent-running and firearms.

The substance of the book details the events underlying that diagram, the successes and failures of changing tactics, the political controversies they provoked, and the ever shifting lines of demarcation between Army and RUC responsibilities.

The Nationalists of Northern Ireland 1918-1973

Enda Staunton
The Columba Press
2001

A huge number of books have been written about the Northern Ireland troubles. There are far fewer covering the first half century of the northern state's existence.

Of those few, Enda Staunton's study of the political history of northern nationalists is among the most important.

Staunton begins with the 1918 election in which Sinn Fein swept the board throughout Ireland including much of the North. In the Belfast constituency of the Falls, however, Eamonn De Valera was to be defeated by Home Ruler Joe Devlin.

This event underlined the internal differences within nationalism, both between North and South, and within the North Itself.

Devlin would later describe the creation of a separate northern Parliament as 'the greatest and last of all calamities.'

Choosing the Green? Second Generation Irish and the Cause of Ireland

Brian Dooley
Beyond the Pale
2004

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

As recently as the 1970s, it was argued that the Irish in Britain were unique, because of the fact that their children assimilated totally into the British population within a generation. If nothing else this book is a spectacular refutation of that assumption.

Choosing the Green looks at the second generation Irish (mainly in Britain but also elsewhere), through their relationship to the Republican tradition.

Author Brian Dooley acknowledges there are other ways of looking at those of Irish descent. He says of writers such as Pete McCarthy “What is remarkable… …is how little impact the Troubles in Northern Ireland appear to have had on their definitions of Irishness.”

Dooley also examines others for whom attitudes to the conflict were decisive. Arguably, this range of opinion is not that that different from the spectrum among the Irish-born. Nevertheless, Dooley is right to apply a political perspective.

The second generation dilemma, how far to identify with Ireland, and how far with Britain, surely derives much of its urgency from the political relationship between the two countries.