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 1916â€"22, using contemporary newspaper files as my source.
