Pack up your troubles?
Provos: the IRA and Sinn Fein by Peter Taylor, Bloomsbury 1997. £16.99
PUBLISHED IN TRIBUNE

Judging by an increasing flood of books, Ireland's problem is not so much self-determination as over-determination.
The latest by veteran Ulster-watcher, Peter Taylor is a competent chronology of the rise of the Provos and the British State's reaction over the course of the Troubles.
There are some new revelations: armalite- smuggling on the QE2, Gerry Adams' apparent admission of IRA membership in a pseudonymous column in which he also argued that "Sinn Fein should come under [IRA] organisers at all levels," secret contacts with the IRA and apparently genuine Provo minutes reporting British willingness to discuss "structures of disengagement." There are some gaps: Sinn Fein's flirtation with parts of the Labour Left and the GLC or the documented Provo manipulation of anti-Orange protests in recent years. And Labour's Secretary of State is not Dr Maureen Mowlam!
Unlike many such histories, it uses interviews with IRA volunteers as well as British soldiers and officials. Adams and Martin McGuinness didn't co-operate.
The book is generally balanced in analysing key moments of the Troubles. For example, Taylor rejects republican theories that Bloody Sunday was a conspiracy but a confused and tragic cock-up, probably sparked off by a maverick republican gunman.