What will you be reading this “summer”? July 11, 2012
Posted by Garibaldy in Books.trackback
Summer definitely feels like the wrong word to describe what’s been going on of late, although I guess being stuck inside due to torrential rain offers an opportunity to catch up on reading. Not that, unlike previous years, I have a particular list of stuff I’m planning to read – actually reading the books on those earlier lists would be a good start.
Some books that might be of interest to people here anyway.
Belfast and Derry in Revolt: A New History of the Start of the Troubles by Simon Prince and Geoffrey Warner. I’m sure this will both be informative and raise some people’s blood pressure.
Rock and Popular Music in Ireland: Before and After U2. Likewise, if not more so.
Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up Globalisation writ large. Conn’s stuff in The Guardian is always worth reading. Even if it isn’t about Shamrock Rovers and the Bohs.
On a related note, just noticed this series of Podcasts on the Guardian, called The Big Ideas. Currently, they are doing Rousseau.
“I’m sure this will both be informative and raise some people’s blood pressure.”
The last chapter, which deals with the weekend of 27th / 28th June, and in particular with the Battle of St. Matthew’s, certainly did both for me.
The informative part came on account of them having access to the British Army radio log for that weekend, which I’d not come across before. The blood pressure part came from the authors’ assertion that St. Matthew’s was basically a trap laid by the IRA in order to lure the army into a gun-battle, which the army tried to avoid, hence no troops were deployed to protect the church until several hours had passed after the initial shooting started.
What’s particularly interesting from a family point of view is that this is the first book I know of that references a pamphlet written by my dad in 1970 about the Battle of St. Matthew’s. This was never published and therein hangs a tale, so please pardon the following rant, as it’s a particular bugbear of mine…
My dad was commissioned to write the pamphlet by Tom Conaty and Canon Padraig Murphy of the CCDC, who were acting on behalf of Bishop Philbin. In researching the pamphlet, he took written statements from Dickie Glenholmes, chairman at the time of the Ballymacarett CDC, and also Paddy Kennedy, a Belfast MP. Last year I gave the originals of these two men’s statements to the Linenhall Library in Belfast – the librarian said he would include them with my dad’s work as appendices.
When my dad had finished the draft of the pamphlet, he gave it to Conaty and Murphy to pass on the the bishop. After some time, not having heard any response, he contacted the bishop himself and surmised from the conversation that they had deliberately withheld the draft. To this day, he believes that they did so because they disliked his conclusion – that the events and killings of that weekend were a direct result of the army’s failure to adhere to a detailed, written agreement regarding policing and security arrangements for the area, made the previous September by the army and the Ballymacarett CDC. I also gave the Linenhall the original of that document last year.
At the time, Conaty and Murphy were anxious to be seen by the army as the leading spokesmen for the Catholic community, so naturally, the publication of a pamphlet that pointed the finger of blame for that weekend’s events at the army did not suit their agenda. My dad quoted one army officer as flippantly dismissing the CDC with the words “These people have to be left to the consequences of their own folly.” I can’t remember offhand whether he also quoted the RUC officer in Mountpottinger barracks who had advised the CDC in advance to “make your own arrangements” but he has often mentioned it to me. But hence Conaty and Murphy’s desire to suppress the pamphlet.
My dad then contacted the bishop directly and arranged to call to his house one Sunday evening, when he knew Conaty and Murphy wouldn’t be around to interfere. He gave a copy of his draft to the bishop and a fairly heated discussion arose as to whether it should be amended – the bishop wanted the conclusion changed, which my dad refused to do. His closing remark to the bishop was “The Italians have the Mafia, the Unionists have the Orange Order, but you have no need of either for you are already surrounded by corruption.”
Anyway, for obvious reasons, the pamphlet never saw the light of day. The manuscript that is in the Linenhall Library was, my dad believes, given to them by Belfast historian Andrew Boyd, to whom he had given a copy. My dad was subsequently frozen out of his position in the CCDC. As a result, he was almost unemployable in Belfast, so we moved to Dublin in 1973.
Anyway, I emailed the authors about the additional documents in the Linenhall, describing the contents – I reckon I donated them after the authors had concluded their research. One of them mailed me back to say that had he seen them, he would probably have modified his conclusions.
Thanks for that, really interesting post. Even without the info you provide, this notion that the Provos were trying to lure the army into a trap just doesn’t add up. The Provos didn’t kill a British soldier in the North until the spring of 1971. When the Officials got into a battle with the army on the Falls the week after St Matthew’s, it was forced on them by a weapons raid; apparently Billy McKee told the Officials that they were mad to try and take on the army at that stage and kept his men out of it. In June 1970, the Provos weren’t ready to fight the army, they didn’t have the guns, they were still in the process of training their recruits. And the political climate hadn’t shifted enough to make attacks on British soldiers popular with nationalists in the way they would be a year or so later.
Besides which, even if they were planning to take on the army, it would have been madness for them to do it in east Belfast, if they managed to provoke a joint army-loyalist attack on the Short Strand, it would have been a disaster, much worse than Bombay St. When they did go on the offensive against the army a year later, they started in places like Clonard and Ballymurphy, much safer ground to launch attacks from.
As far as the Provos were concerned, what happened in St Matthew’s suited them just fine in terms of their development at that stage, it allowed them to present themselves as the defenders of beleaguered nationalist communities, ‘never again’ and all that. Attacking the army would just have made a mess of that. I’d say it was most likely an ex post facto rationalisation by the army command for why they didn’t send troops that night; or perhaps they really didn’t have a clue about the dynamics of the situation and wrongly believed that the Provos were trying to lure them into an ambush.
I’d be interested to hear in broad terms the origins of that supposed remark from McKee. The people who were there who contributed to the recent WP pamphlet on the curfew were all adamant about 2 provos throwing nail bombs and then the provos being ordered by McKee to get out of the area, although a few remained. Then you have the Brendan Hughes account (a version of which I think is available on Youtube, presumably from the DVD the provos did seeking to annex the resistance to the curfew to themselves as well as in Voices from the Grave) of the short-lived involvement of himself and others. There have also been claims that McKee offered to send men down but was refused by McMillen. But I’ve never heard the version you’re presenting here Ed.
It comes from the Sunday Times Insight book ‘Ulster’, their story is that McKee rang up the local Official commander (he’s not named, but presumably Sullivan?) to see what was going on, then told him he was mad to try taking on the army. They don’t quote a direct source but had good contacts in both IRAs so presumably the story came from there.
Don’t know if it’s corroborated elsewhere, but it seems compatible with what you refer to, local Provos getting involved then being ordered out by McKee. I haven’t read Voices from the Grave yet but it’s very telling in ‘Before the Dawn’, Adams tries to make out it was all Provos doing the fighting during the Falls curfew, he doesn’t even mention the Officials by name. The Sunday Times book was first published at the start of 1972 so much closer to the events than either Hughes or Adams, for what that’s worth.
Would Robert Fisk have been involved in writing that book? I seem to remember it also has a line somewhere about how Northern Ireland had not yet had its Amritsar: the book was published a few weeks before Bloody Sunday.
That’s a good question, I don’t know when Fisk came to Ireland first, his book on the anti-Sunningdale movement came out in 1974, not sure if he was already on the scene in ’71. I can’t remember now if he was writing for the Times or the Sunday Times, either – did they have the same reporting teams back then?
I think the Insight team was a separate investigative unit, completely separate to the main correspondents who would’ve reported under their own bye-lines.
Thanks Ed. McMillen was the senior person in the area at the time as he lived there. There’s always been suspicion that McKee ordered the bombs to be thrown, and then the pull out, to leave the IRA to deal with the consequences.
There is an interview in the Irish Times on July 7th where a senior provo (McKee I think) admits that the provisionals as an organisation played no role in the events.
They knew exactly what was going on, Glenholmes and Kennedy went to Mountpottinger several times during the night begging for military protection, but the official army line was they were too stretched cos of rioting and shooting that’d been happening earlier in the day on the Springfield Road and around Ardoyne. I think they claimed they’d only 20 troops to spare for the whole of east Belfast, yet they’d enough to seal off the two bridges and then when they did finally deploy, they went to protect the bus depot to prevent buses being hijacked rather than to the church where all the shooting was going on.
If you still have a copy could you send it to wbs to put in the archive here?
+1, sounds like a good addition.
My grandad is actually Tom, although I know very little about all this and definitely do not pretend to, this is an interesting read!
Just finished Terry Eagleton’s “Why Marx Was Right” last week and have started into Marx’s “Early Writings”, in particular the Paris manuscripts. I have to say I’m looking forward to a bit of time off work so that I can get some reading done outside of bedtime as I’m finding my eyelids start drooping after about 5-10 pages of Marx. I know that’s an awful admission but I blame it in part on the drowsiness of the anti-histamines as we’re in the hayfever season at the minute. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
I picked up a copy of JK Galbraith’s “Age of Uncertainty” in the second hand bookshop on the Hill of Tara a few months ago and it looks like light enough holiday reading. Also got a copy of Alex Nove’s “The Economics Of Feasible Socialism” which looked like an interesting work when it cropped up in a discussion somewhere on Francis Spufford’s novel “Red Plenty”, which itself is top of the pile for my holiday reading. Spufford himself mentioned in a comment on Crooked Timer’s recent series of posts on his book that he was influenced by Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life And Fate”, which I’ve seen in Easons recently and was very tempted to purchase, but I’m trying not to add to the reading backlog at the moment so I resisted the temptation.
A friend of mine was at the recent launch of the TASC pamphlet “Towards a Flourishing Society” which she promised to forward a copy, so I thought I might have a go at “Towards a Second Republic” by Mary Murphy and Peadar Kirby while I’m in that frame of mind.
And if I get bored with all of the above I’m really looking forward to a dose of Hobsbawm, his “Age Of Empire” which I somehow skipped while reading the others in the series, and his memoir “Interesting Times”.
There’s also Stalin’s “Marxism And The National Question”, just to keep me on the ideological straight and narrow.
The Age of Uncertainty I read a while back and really enjoyed. It’s a pity they haven’t brought it out on DVD as they have some of its illustrious peers, Ascent of Man, All You Need Is Love, Civilisation, back from the days when a documentary series didn’t need to be Hugh Grant on a motorbike telling you why he’d always been interested in the Battle of El Alamein.
Just after finishing a biography of Wexford politician Richard Corish by Nicholas Roche. Very informative on the Wexford Lockout (which I’ll be doing a post about the Lockout and the recent unveiling of a monument to commemorate it in the near future), the personalities involved which included Larkin and Connolly.
Good bit about the ITGWU and of course Wexford Town itself.
I found it especially enjoyable as I know some of the family well and I find it fascinating the connections between their Grandfather and Larkin, Connolly and others… living History as it were.
Think I’ll give 50 shades of Grey a miss.
Was in a Waterstones at the weekend inquiring after a particular tome and I noticed that the book trolley beside the order counter was almost full with order copies of one or other of the ’50 Shades’ books, that despite there being a well stocked display in the shop as well. Say what you like about the like phenomenon, it will likely keep a few book shops, and book shop workers, going for a couple of months, or at least stave off closure. More power to her elbow if that’s one result of the ’50 shades’ craze.
Was talking to someone today who told me that 50 Shades book has sold over a million copies on Kindel as there are quite a few that don’t want to be seen reading it, yet want to read it!
Agree that anything keeping bookstores in business is a good thing.
The sales figures in the Sunday Times were massive both here and in the UK. It’s apparently the biggest selling book for adults, as opposed to an ‘adult’ book, ever.
It’s like Dan Brown. Appears from nowhere, shoots up the best seller lists, massive media stuff, it infests all the newspapers, and then just sits there for weeks and months.
Yes, apt comparison. Alas, I can’t a movie.version of ’50 Shades’ being quite an mainstream as the Dan Browne inspired movies were!
Yeah, might pose a few problems.
Jesus, Brown’s stuff in 2003 was like a rash. Always seemed sub-sub-Ludlum to me.
Expecting the rain to continue. Some of these:
‘Why Marx Was Right’ – Terry Eagleton
‘The Event of Literature’ – Terry Eagleton
‘Will the revolution be televised’ – John Molyneux
‘The point is to change it – an introduction to Marxist philosophy’
John Molyneux
‘Downfall; the Tommy Sheridan Story’ Alan McCombes
Tommy Sheridan: From Hero to Zero’ – Gregor Gall
Good luck with the Paris Manuscripts LATC. Was several Summer’s reading for me. Might get back to them soon. Best taken in small bites.
I’d be interested in the Sheridan books; where would you get them here in Ireland? Or is Amazon the only option?
Amazon.
Haven’t read G. Gall yet. A. McCombes is unputdownable.
Perhaps in the sense that there’s something riveting about the sheer viciousness McCombes displays throughout. One of the most bitter and nasty cash ins I’ve ever read.
Cheers.
In fact here’s a condensed version of “Downfall” (I do like the Hitler reference in the title), for anyone who doesn’t want to give money to McCombes:
I, Alan McCombes, was always the brains of the outfit. Tommy Sheridan was merely my mouthpiece. Then he got ideas above his station. Also, he’s a sexual and moral degenerate and probably a few other things which I heard “rumours” about, can’t really be sure of, but I’ll mention anyway.
Every single person who sided with me is a good, decent, honest person, salt of the earth, a true socialist. Every single person who felt the slightest sympathy for Sheridan is a cynical, dishonest knave with base motives.
There you go, I’ve saved you a tenner.
Just finishing Lucio Magri’s Tailor of Ulm, highly recommended though dense with information and analysis and certainly not light reading. Also recently read G2: In Defence of Ireland: Irish Military Intelligence 1918-45, Maurice Walsh and In Green and Red: The Lives of Frank Ryan, by Adrian Hoar, neither terribly well-written, although Walsh’s book is very interesting, especially on Irish code-breaking.
Looking forward to Curzio Malaparte’s Manual of the coup d’etat, and a couple of collections of poetry.
Snap re the G2 book. Interesting, but very oddly structured and a lot of stuff that’s hard to work out. For example. Dan Bryan. When did he become a full Colonel. What date did he move from Deputy Director to full Director of G2, and reading between the lines it seems he was acting Director for most of 41 and perhaps even 40.
Bruce Nelson’s ‘Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race’ (Princeton, 2012) and F. Stuart Ross ‘Smashing H-Block’ (Liverpool, 2011) are two that I hope to read soon.
Two books I thought were criminally overlooked when they came out were Eamonn Sweeney’s ‘Down, Down, Deeper and Down’ (2010) and Kevin Bean’s ‘The New Politics of Sinn Féin’ (2007), and both are well worth reading.
The Ross book is very good, hasn’t got the attention it deserves (Eamonn McCann gave it a good write-up in the Belfast Telegraph, that’s the only mention I’ve seen of it). V. good read too, I got through it in a day or two.
@Garibaldy Somebody had better tell Wikipedia:
The Battle of St Matthew’s or Battle of Short Strand[1] was a gun battle fought between the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Ulster loyalists on 27 June 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_St_Matthew%27s
I think somebody has been slipping up in their reading of CAIN.
We’re talking about both the Falls Curfew and the Short Strand. The Short Strand thing was mostly the provos, unlike the Curfew. Although there has been a move to rewrite the history of the Curfew to put the provos at the centre.
‘Quiet’ by Susan Cain, despite it’s breathless American style, was a genuine eye-opener for me – and, I would think, for anyone with any involvement in education.
Half way through the new Banville, ‘Ancient Light’. Masterful.
If you’re a Banville fan, he has an interesting list of his 20 favourite books on the Foyles bookshop website at the moment.
I have hatched a plan to outweait the crisis – which I am not expecting to be of short duration – by reading the classics of English literature which i am buying in secondhand bookshops and charity shops every time I am in the UK. This week in Penarth I have got myself a couple of Joseph Conrads and an Elizabeth Gaskell.
Hmmm, it’s interesting that Banville has written a book about a fraud.
Why so?
Because he comes from the Wexford village of Ballinafraud perhaps? Or maybe it’s just a bit of petty snarkery.
Every Banville novel I can think of is about a fraud, really.
Actually after having made that comment I realised that same myself. Is it a comment about the author of fiction, the meta-narrative underpinning all story-telling blah blah blah. Having read a number of his books I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s very over-rated. But that is a personal opinion.
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
I must finish Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics. And WBS has lent/given me two books that need attention.
And I’ll order one of Seluck Altun’s detective novels.
Eleven months on: I started the Seluck Altun but did not finish it. I did not start Graeber’sDebt and added to the pile in the mean time with Blyth’s Austerity and Applebaum’s Iron Curtain. Keen’s Debunking Economics remains unfinished.
A novel by a neoliberal: The Dream of the Celt, by Mario Vargas Llosa.
I feel a bit outgunned here. But looking at the stack beside the bed, I see Riding The Rap, one of the few Elmore Leonards I haven’t read, Putting On The Ritz by Joe Keenan, who wrote most of the great Frasier episodes and also Blue Heaven which is one of those very rare creatures, a really funny novel, and More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, the second one in the series but the one I missed for some reason.
And I’m just finishing a novel I’d heartily recommend, Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt, a book from 1971 about a fictional opera diva. McCourt is an Irish-American writer who is very funny and in a very individual way seems to have come closer to capturing the comic spirit of Joyce better than almost anyone else. It’s published in the New York Review of Books Classic series, if you come across any of these distinctive looking paperbacks in a second hand shop take a chance and buy it, almost all of them are interesting and some of them are really revelatory. They’re like an alternative canon.
Killing time on a recent trip to Dublin I strayed into Forbidden Planet, for the sake of the kids of course, and emerged with collected editions of three old 2000AD classics, Skizz, DR and Quinch and Robo Hunter, the first two written by Alan Moore. Skizz is fantastic, even better than I remembered it, a kind of ET directed by Ken Loach at his best. So the other two are on the to read list as well.
And speaking of kids I’ve also spent the last few nights reading The Amazing Mr Blunden by Antonia Barber to my eldest daughter. It’s a fantastic novel, one of a series of Timeslip books which came out in the sixties and seventies in what seems like a golden age of children’s literature. The others include Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, A Traveller In Time by Alison Uttley, The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston, The House In Norham Gardens by Penelope Lively. I don’t know why this theme struck such a chord with these writers, perhaps something to do with the psychological effect of the second world war, but it resulted in a strange and wonderful mini-genre.
And while I’m fully prepared to admit that my admiration of Skizz has more than a little to do with nostalgia, I think all these novels are genuinely terrific. Charlotte Sometimes, in particular, seems almost perfect and is even more haunting than the rest.
Anyway, excuse me for getting all Mumsnet but I went to see Brave yesterday and anyone here who’s dragged along by their kids to see it in a couple of weeks time won’t be sorry they acquiesced.
Thanks to Brian as well.
On novels, I had this recommended to me a while ago and it is spectacularly good, and almost prophetic given it was written in 1990: The Journey Home, Dermot Bolger.
The bio of Andy Cooney.
Warrior in a lost cause
A Splendid Resistance: the life of IRA Chief of Staff, Dr. Andy Cooney
By Michael MacEvilly, foreword by Sean O’Mahony
(De Búrca Books, €20 pb)
Very much the militarist wing of Republicanism. With an interesting friendship in the end.
Smashing H Block by Stuart Ross. See this review by eamonn McCann
http://www.derryjournal.com/community/columnists/smashing-h-block-1-3449401
This marked the cross road for the Provos. 3 possible directions. Continue with a military campaign ( witness the dead ends of RIRA and CIRA). Become more Republican Socialist (Hopefully Eirigi continues to reject the militarism).
Or follow Clann na Phoblachta and , well we know where they are going.
The book is very objective. The facts are all there. I like this because I feel a good history book should contain all the facts and allow the reader to evaluate for themself. Rereading in in detail. I still find the events traumatic. I was very involved in the Dublin end.Trying to build a movement in the space of a life on hunger strike.
Oh an Revolutionary history has published a book on the solidarity movement with the Algerian Revolution.
http://www.socialistunity.com/the-european-left-and-algerian-independence-1954-1962/
New issue of Revolutionary History
The latest edition of Revolutionary History is now available to order:
European Revolutionaries and Algerian Independence, 1954-1962
Where will I get the tim
“Artist of the Revolution” by James Curry is good, about the cartoonist on Larkin’s Irish Worker. Lots of pictures as well! I’m about half way though the biography of Michael Mallin by Brian Hughes, and so far it’s fascinating stuff. The Connolly biography from the same series might be worth a read if it’s of the same standard as this.
As for the comment on 50 Shades of Grey, from what I hear there is no shortage of “power to her elbow” (nudge nudge wink wink). Of course I’ve been putting off reading it myself until it’s reviewed on CLR. From an Althusserian perspective, like.
An tIomaire run by Tomas o Maille a good account of the war of independence in Connemara
Started “Here Comes Everybody -The Story of The Pogues” by James Fearnley and I have to say its an excellent read and gives a great insight into the band and Shane McGowan as well as Fearnleys own life.
I’ll be reading the League of Ireland table. For now anyway.
does your father work in your casino?