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Foreword

Soldiering against Subversion is the latest historical volume from the pen of Lt. Col. Dan Harvey. It makes an important contribution to our knowledge of a deeply contested period in Irish history. Written from the perspective of a serving Irish army officer, whose distinguished career spanned the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and beyond, the book’s narrative strength is rooted in the combination of skills of an author who is both an historian and an expert in the study of international peace-keeping (and also a distinguished practitioner), guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency.

Having reviewed the bloody events on the island of Ireland from the late 1960s, he concludes judiciously: ‘However, the Aid to the Civil Power policy employed by the Government was very wise in the long run and the merits of a police-led counter-subversive campaign were vindicated. Its practice, applied purposefully on the ground by the Defence Forces, proved a highly relevant and appropriate approach to a very difficult security and political situation. This book lucidly chronicles – from the perspective of an officer with boots on the ground – how that policy, so succinctly expressed above, was formed and implemented during ‘the Troubles’ and how well it served to preserve democracy on this island. There was nothing inevitable about the choice of such a policy. It emerged, in inchoate form, in the late 1960s when the more hot-headed in government advocated paths mercifully not taken. The Irish army performed its professional task in the most difficult and testing of circumstances. This book may help the many realise the debt owed to the few who soldiered against subversion since the foundation of the state and, in particular, during thirty years of a futile, bloody and absolutely needless war.

It is sobering to reflect on the fact that Irish students in third level in the latter years of the second decade of the twentieth century were either infants or not yet born when the Belfast Agreement was signed on 10 April 1998. That generation, reading this volume, have no personal experience of living on an island when, in the 1970s, the press and television headlined the daily round of car-bomb blasts, sectarian attacks, tit-for-tat killings and the endless funeral processions as innocent victims of that violence were buried. Those tragedies – resulting from being in the wrong place at the wrong time – changed family histories forever. There were the bombastic paramilitary funerals where ‘volunteers’ – loyalist or republican – were buried with ‘full military honours’. Their families, too, were devastated and their lives changed forever. There were the unforgettable photos or television footage of a body covered with a sheet on a lonely country road – the victim of a paramilitary ‘execution’, or of somebody shot by the British army. Who can forget the British reaction to Bloody Sunday in Derry, on 30 January 1972, when members of the parachute regiment killed 14 protesters. There was righteousness on all sides brought out so well in the paintings of the artist Rita Duffy.

Reviewing that terrible period, I have two personal thoughts. Firstly, there was what I believe to have been the futility of it all. It need never have happened. There was no need for ‘war’. Armed violence was not inevitable – with the Armalite in one hand and the ballot box in the other. There was a peaceful democratic solution as laid out in the late 1960s – and throughout his public life – by the Nobel Peace-Prize laureate, John Hume. That prize is awarded for a person who has made ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’. The author of this volume is in no doubt about the fact that, from his perspective the ‘war’ was unnecessary.

Secondly, I am of the view that – given the nature of the violence in Northern Ireland – there was nothing inevitable or deterministic about the signing of the Belfast Peace Agreement in 1998. That may have looked a faraway prospect in the late 1960s and 1970s as the Irish army provided support for a ‘police-led counter-subversive campaign’ in the fields and by-roads along a 300-mile border with Northern Ireland and elsewhere. That formed part of the unglamorous but necessary role of the Irish army in that twilight world of soldiering against subversion to protect the institutions and personnel of the state from armed attack. This book reveals part of the hidden history leading to the Good Friday Agreement.

I can still vividly recall the shock of learning about the murder of Garda Richard Fallon on 3 April 1970 following a bank robbery in Dublin. In all, a dozen gardaí died at the hands of subversives between 1970 and 1985. The chief prison officer in Portlaoise, Brian Stack, was shot by the IRA on 25 March 1983 and lived for 18 months following the attack. Peace did not come without a cost to servants of the Irish state.

There is an honourable tradition in this country of retiring from public or professional life while keeping one’s counsel in retirement. This was determined by a culture of secrecy which enveloped public life during the early decades of the new Irish state. In that post-revolutionary world, the secrets of the civil war and of fighting subversion from the 1920s to the 1950s were rarely written about by either politicians, civil servants, soldiers or gardaí. But that tradition has been long since broken. Col. Dan Bryan, head of Irish Military Intelligence (G2), deposited his papers in the UCD Archives. Col. Maurice Walsh has published G2 – In Defence of Ireland: Irish military intelligence 1918–1948 and Capt. James Kelly published a number of books on his experiences. Hopefully, after the publication of this volume, other retired officers will either publish monographs or leave their personal papers and reminiscences to Irish Military Archives.

Lt. Col. Harvey would be first to admit that this volume is not the last word on the wide sweep of Irish history reviewed. Besides bringing a great deal of new evidence to light from this hitherto unique soldiering perspective, this volume indirectly calls attention to the salient fact that so much of the Irish War of Independence, the Civil War, World War Two and the earlier IRA border campaigns has been lost. While there is still time, the same mistake ought not to be made about 1968 onwards. There ought to be a concerted effort to interview the gardaí and soldiers involved in policing and soldiering against subversion. This would also involve the preservation of garda logs and military patrol records, the archives of border garda stations and the archiving of captured subversive literature. There is the need to undertake an oral history or a Bureau of Military History-style witness statement record. More specifically, the relevant records in digital format of different government departments need to be centralised on a data base. Those sources ought to be coordinated and held in a central repository – the Military Archive.

This book will engage the reader from the first sentence of the prologue which recounts the events surround the kidnapping of the industrialist, Tiede Herrema, in October 1975, followed by the interception of the gun-running ship, Claudia, in 1973 and finally the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974. It would be hard to choose three more significant events with which to focus the mind of any reader. For the generations who lived through those decades, the events are a stark reminder of what quickly became the new ‘normal’. For a younger generation, this volume will provide you with an insight of what it was like to soldier against subversion for decades. A chronology and list of abbreviations have been supplied.

In reading the text, I am reminded of the terrible cost of ‘the Troubles’ to those living on this island and in England. Over 3,000 needlessly wasted lives thanks to the dictates of the respective warlords! The long-term cost of that carnage will no doubt be evident in what will hopefully be a future Truth and Reconciliation process. But there is also, notwithstanding the final peace agreement in 1998, of nearly thirty wasted years. Ireland and Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973. So much energy, resources and creativity in both countries went into responding to the threat of subversion in Northern Ireland. So much money, which might have been deflected to education and job creation, dissipated. The lives of over 3,000 people – who would have contributed to the commonweal – lost. Reading Lt. Col. Harvey’s book will – for those with an open mind – de-romanticises the decades of subversion now glamorised by republican revisionists.

Dr Dermot Keogh is

Emeritus Professor of History,

University College Cork