Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh

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I suddenly got a promotion and was going to work in a helicopter. I thought, ‘will I die here?’ — Alan Mains With a population of less than 1,200 during that period, there were between 2,000 and 3,000 British troops in and around the republican stronghold. Today, there are none. But the walkway is still the same from where I would have come. If you walked down through the town you’d be guaranteed your bag would be taken off you by the soldiers or you’d be chased.

At times an uncomfortable read at times but one which in many ways is fascinating...it tells the tale of the modern troubles from the period of the seventies through to a then shaky peace deal as we entered the millennium. Given the level of detail on various operations - successful and unsuccessful - one can't help but marvel at the sheer scale of the inventiveness and determination that a small group of individuals could display in the face of Empire, regardless of how one feels on the political or moral logic of the armed campaign. Regardless of the semantics, the cat and mouse games, the watch towers, the endless measures and countermeasures make for a fascinating read. urn:oclc:262886039 Republisher_date 20180328134526 Republisher_operator [email protected] Republisher_time 737 Scandate 20180317105243 Scanner ttscribe25.hongkong.archive.org Scanningcenter hongkong Tts_version v1.58-final-5-g8c4c1bd Worldcat (source edition)based upon hypothesis, speculation and a source or sources that the authors refused to disclose. Statements and allegations were put forward as matters of fact when in reality they were founded upon speculation and hypothesis”. 2 The branding of south Armagh as “bandit country” by former Northern Ireland secretary Merlyn Rees in 1974 is a tag that persists; it was reinforced by a photograph Byrne tweeted on Christmas Day three years ago, showing him posing at the station gates beside officers armed with machine guns. Outside Keenan’s Bar, an official Northern Ireland tourist information sign hangs which serves as the “centre point” for Walsh’s walking tours. The policing is a wee bit more normal than it was but let’s face it, it’s not normal,” McConville adds.

Eventually, Johnson and his ex-MI6 colleague Jayne Robinson uncover historic hidden files, documents and dark secrets from three decades earlier that certain high-flying public figures would rather remained unread. And indeed, it would be hard to argue with this assessment of her work. In 2017, she published her debut poetry collection Bloodroot – a book so explicitly about the inseparability of body and landscape that both are in constant communication with one another. “The first time a tree / called me by name,” Ní Churreáin writes in End of Girlhood. “I was 13 and only spoke a weave of ordinary tongues.”If you walked down through the town you’d be guaranteed your bag would be taken off you by the soldiers — Oisín McConville