Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh

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But with the motive unknown, the clock is ticking down as the president and UK prime minister prepare for a G8 world summit near Belfast. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. South Armagh, for those not in the know, is a rural location which saw a decades long battle between the PIRA and the British Army who, depending on your point of view, were either invaders continuing an imperialist agenda or people simple defending their fellow countrymen. This is about something I grew up with, but I can safely say that somebody with absolutely no knowledge of the situation past "the English invaded Ireland at some point and people got mad about it" could read this and have no trouble at all -- and not to mention a fairly comprehensive knowledge when they came out of it. Focusing on both issues of his homeland and further afield, he seeks to translate stories of society to a photographic audience.

That's not easy to do even when presenting two viewpoints or opinions with fictional characters; how Harnden managed it with real people in a real situation is beyond me. The structure is disjointed, and it jumps around in a distracting and confusing manner, always trying to squeeze in more stuff than it can manage.Harnden constructs a picture of the area as being particularly lawless, prone to violence and a 'place apart'.

A book leaves our collection of over seven million titles and begins a new chapter every two seconds, enabling more goods to be reused. Drawing on secret documents and interviews in South Armagh's recent history, he tells the inside story of how the IRA came close to bringing the British state to its knees. Covering the period from the late 70s through early 2000s, he provides subtantive context for the pivotal (often violent) events in the British/Loyalist/Republican tensions.

Collin's book 'Killing Rage' is a graphic account of his personal involvement in Provisional IRA military activities and his later disillusionment. Loses points for its slight - and in the light of recent conclusive official confirmation of systematic British Army-RUC-UDR-Loyalist collusion, absolutely ridiculous - bias towards 'official' viewpoints on the sources of violence and evidence of security force misconduct and injustice towards the Nationalist community. Given the level of detail on various operations - successful and unsuccessful - one can't help but marvel at the sheer scale of the inventiveness and determination that a small group of individuals could display in the face of Empire, regardless of how one feels on the political or moral logic of the armed campaign. Toby Harnden's book, Bandit Country, is an incredible glance at the unbeaten, undefeated South Armagh.

From a point of history it is interesting to read how troubled this period was and how much things seem to have moved on. This book is a must read and if you are only to ever read one book on the situation in Northern Ireland, well this is it. This was where many of the British troops in Northern Ireland were killed and it became one of the most dangerous places to serve in in the British Army.

Additionally, for the first time, the identities of the men behind the South Quay and Manchester bombings are revealed.