The terrorist as statesman.

• Author: Myers, Kevin
• Position: "A Farther Shore: Ireland's Long Road to Peace" - Book Review

Gerry Adams, A Farther Shore: Ireland's Long Road to Peace (New York: Random House, 2003), 448 pp., $25.95.

IN THE 1930s, with the ghastly blood-letting of 1916-22 at a reasonably safe distance, nationalist Ireland began to create a fresh narrative about those Troubles, one which was thoroughly sanitized. This tale was drenched with Irish victimhood, British villainy and republican gallantry; Irish nationalism had discovered something entirely new in the history of war: peaceful terrorism.

The scores of innocent civilians who were killed in the rising in Dublin in 1916 were forgotten. So too were the Protestants murdered by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) because of their religion, and the thousands of "loyalists"--people faithful to the union with Britain--driven from newly independent Ireland. The campaign against Irishmen who had served in the British army in the Great War--hundreds were murdered--completely vanished both from the popular memory and the official histories.

Most of us who have lived through the latest version of the Irish Troubles--which started in 1969--would have been confident that no such historical fable-making was possible any longer. The atrocities of the IRA had been too spectacular, too visible, too frequent for republicans to be able create a cleansed narrative in which they were unsullied heroes. I certainly believed that, though I really should have known better, since I have made it my business since the 1980s to write in my column in the Irish Times not just on the current Troubles, but also on the Troubles of 1916-22, using contemporary newspaper files as my source.

Archives of Irish Times issues dating back to the first Troubles make for terrible reading, because contrary to what one might expect from reading the history books, enough of the truth of IRA atrocities was being reported daily. To be sure, the poor wretches who were secretly abducted, tortured, killed and buried did not figure in these reports (how could they?); but the campaign against the ex-servicemen--it was even called that in the papers--emphatically did, with the newspaper keeping a melancholy score of the daily toll. The attacks on Protestants in West Cork, their murders and the forcible eviction of thousands were extensively covered too.

So too were other truths. That contrary to what many people believed, Kevin Barry, the great republican martyr of the Troubles, wasn't executed simply because he was an Irish republican, but because he had murdered two boy-soldiers collecting bread. Nor was he the first victim of the hangman's noose in the Troubles. That dismal distinction went not to an Irish republican, but to a policeman the week before Barry was hanged. He was executed for murdering a civilian.

Yet Irish nationalism was nonetheless able to eradicate the dark stain of murderous truth from its self-absorbed and self-justifying narrative. When the perpetrators of quite terrible deeds--such as Tom Barry, Ernie O'Malley and Dan Breen--wrote their memoirs, there was already a congenial mythological setting for them to find their place. Their factual corruption entered almost all official histories, like a modern computer virus.

The New Cleansers

PRECISELY the same diseased process is occurring now. Gerry Adams, the IRA leader throughout the Troubles from 1971 onwards, who in another epoch would certainly have been tried for war crimes, is now the most respected political party leader in all of Ireland. Barely less respected than him is his fellow IRA chieftain, Martin McGuinness...