The lying: a former terrorist describes his life in the IRA, and looks at the current peace negotiations through the prism of what he learned in his old life

A former terrorist describes his life in the IRA, and looks at the current peace negotiations through the prism of what he learned in his old life.

I WAS born in 1954 in Tralee, County Kerry, in the Irish Republic. It was and still is an area with a strong republican tradition. After the treaty and the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 the IRA and the new Free State Army fought a bitter civil war. That war was conducted with great savagery in Kerry. Less than three miles from my parents' house, eight IRA prisoners were blown to pieces by government forces in an officially sanctioned reprisal for the earlier IRA murder of a Free State Army officer.

Civil war bitterness was still very much alive in parts of Kerry in the 1950s. My father's side of the family was steeped in that tradition. He and his brother, active IRA men, were interned without trial in the Curragh military camp in the early 1940s. My father, several aunts, and other family members have remained lifelong activists and supporters of the republican movement. That was the tradition and the family background into which I was born.

We were an ordinary working class family. We stood out in no regard other than that my father was a member of a small, essentially secret organization which still harbored dreams of a 32-county republic. They believed that such a republic would only come about by armed force. Occasionally I came across guns, and once explosives, hidden in the house. Sometimes there were meetings in the house or in my grandmother's. We were always sent somewhere else when anything of that nature was taking place but we had at least a vague idea that something exciting or dangerous was happening. We knew that nothing of this was ever to be repeated to our friends.

Like the great mass of Irish people I was educated in my early years at school by nuns and Christian Brothers. The Brothers had a fierce nationalist ethos. They saw themselves as the moral guardians of nationalist Ireland. It was a world of Gaelic games, the Irish language, and endless songs and stories about noble Irish patriots and treacherous English. The treachery of the English was at the root of all of Ireland's ills.

The 1916 rebellion was celebrated with great gusto in 1966, when I was 12 years old. RTE [Radio Telefis Eireann] television indulged in an orgy of adulation. Schools had special screenings of films on the rising. We played mock games of Irish versus the British. I always wanted to be James Connolly, the republican socialist executed by the British after the surrender of the rebels. Less than two years after these celebrations the civil-rights movement in Northern Ireland burst onto our television screens. In reality we understood little about the issues, but our sympathies were firmly with the Catholics in Northern Ireland. When sectarian violence broke out in Belfast in 1969 there was a huge outpouring of emotion in the Republic. Soon Catholic refugees were being billeted in local houses, church property, and the army barracks.

The IRA split, and the Provisional IRA was formed: an event which I now regard as the greatest tragedy in modern Irish history. That was not how I felt at the time, of course. I was 15 years old in 1970 and could not wait to enlist. My political views were certainly to the left of the leadership of the Provisional movement. Some of the overt militarism, bordering on fascism, did worry me. I saw the Provisionals as rather like a popular front which would sweep away partition and the British presence. We would then have a realignment of the Left in Irish politics. After that it was full steam down the road to the socialist republic. There you have the sum total of the political literacy of a 15-year-old would-be Irish revolutionary.

Like most others of my age in the Republic I knew nothing of Protestants or unionists other than that they were known as the Ascendancy. They stole the land from the Catholics and persecuted them. The Protestant working class in Northern Ireland were simply dupes of the unionist ruling classes and the British government. Our naivete and ignorance was incredible. We would throw the British out and then the poor stupid prods would see the error of their ways and join us in a new utopian Ireland. In truth we gave little or no consideration to the question of what to do with Protestants. We were ready to fight against the British just like our forefathers. This time we would finish the business. British rule in Ireland would end for all time.

I joined the IRA in Tralee. My family background was such that I had little difficulty in joining -- it was positively expected. It was not long before young IRA recruits in Northern Ireland were coming to Kerry for training in the use of weapons and explosives. Even though I was very young I found myself actively involved in this part of IRA activity. Needless to say, school appeared pretty boring by comparison and I soon lost interest in it.

The IRA recruits from Northern Ireland were in the main ordinary young men such as you would find in any British city, town, or rural area. They wore the same clothes, listened to the same music, and followed the same soccer clubs. They were more likely to spend their time arguing about the merits of Manchester United or Liverpool than politics. That came later, after exposure to the Provisional ideologues in Long Kesh and other prisons.