Inside the IRA
* Killing Rage, Eamon Collins with Mick McGovern, Granta Books, 1997, £15.99.
* Fifty Dead Men Walking, Martin McGartland, Blake, 1997. £16.99.
book review for Tribune

The IRA is one of the world's most tenacious terrorist organisations with around 500 volunteers at any one time. Thousands have joined since 1971. The Provos are also increasingly porous: newspapers profile IRA leaders and publish secret documents while sociologists dissect its entrails. These books add to all this by offering the personal stories of two contrasting Provos - one a zealot, the other "one of the Special Branch's best spies."
Eamon Collins, a northern Catholic from a reasonably well-off background, with a law degree and a good job in the British Customs is wooed by an English ultra-leftist. He becomes a "republican communist" setting up targets for murder, including his colleagues even while acting as their union representative. "Every aspect of my life was dedicated to the purpose of death." Eventually caught, he initially turns supergrass, then recants but still rejects terrorism.
Marty McGartland, on the other hand, is a working class wide boy  - nicknamed Arthur (Daley) - reared on a rough Catholic estate: truancy, glue-sniffing, joy-riding and taunting  the "peelers." Special Branch persuades him to infiltrate the IRA where he becomes a security officer with widespread knowledge of leading players and saves about 50 lives. Then he is arrested, he says, by Gerry Adams' bodyguards and escapes execution by diving head-first out of a third storey window. He is now unhappily exiled in fear of an IRA death squad. His brother was beaten to within an inch of his life for McGartland's actions.
Collins traces his "dirty little deeds" in a grim exposure of the "ruthless amorality" of IRA work - its "bumbling thuggishness and occasional military effectiveness," sustained by fatuous politics which are "cliched tripe." The brutal text is haunted by shocking images of futile suffering. McGartland's jauntier book gives the flavour of the love-hate relationship with the IRA in Catholic ghettos.
Both criticise insensitive Army and RUC actions which increased IRA credibility with kids like them. Both had Protestant relations or friendships. Each deeply regrets their own role in IRA violence. Collins emerges as "fanatical, full of anger and contempt, and ready to connive at the deaths of his enemies when they are unarmed and vulnerable." He now believes that the IRA is not a liberator but deliberately provokes sectarianism to justify violence and protect its own power.
But he praises Sinn Fein's political development against which he and other hard-line Provos had once conspired, even accusing Adams of selling out. He now claims