Taylor - The Provos: the IRA and Sinn Fein

Never before has an outsider had such access to record the remarkable history of the provisional IRA and Sinn Fein, the Provos, from their dramatic beginnings to the critical juncture they have reached today on the brink of becoming part of the cabinet in the new government of Northern Ireland. It is an astonishing story.

Thirty years ago, the Irish Republican Army was a fading historical memory. It had dumped its guns and embraced extreme left-wing politics. The result was that when sectarian violence erupted in 1969 and nationalist areas came under loyalist attack, only a handful of IRA veterans were on hand to defend them. Taunting graffiti read IRA I ran away. The consequences were momentous. The IRA split and the Provisional IRA was born to become the most formidable organisation of its kind in the Western world. For more than a quarter of a century the Provisionals have fought a bloody campaign, in which over 3,000 lives have been lost, to force the British government to disengage from Northern Ireland and re-unify Ireland.

Today their leaders, once branded as terrorists, have been feted at the White House and become regular visitors to Downing Street. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are now Westminister Members of Parliament, steering the Provos to acceptance of the historic Good Friday peace Agreement which they believe will be the stepping stone to the United Ireland they and their followers have fought and died for. In a series of remarkable, first-hand interviews with the Provisionals who fought on the military and political fronts and the British who countered them, Provos tells the extraordinary story of the evolution of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein over 30 bloody years, from gunmen and bombers to potential statesmen. With IRA and loyalist ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement in place, are we now about to see the final resolution of one of the worlds most ancient conflicts?

Frank Steele (right) in Derry, early 1970s.

Billy McKee and leading Provisional Proinsias MacAirt in Crumlin Road prison, 1972.

Reverend Ian Paisley remonstrating with Peter Taylor at Stormont, 1974

Cathal Crumley (centre) on release from Long Kesh, 1980.

Snapshot: Declan Arthurs, Dermont Quinn, Martin McCaughey, Seamus Donnelly, Tony Gormley and Eugene Kelly (left to right) at the Cappagh memorial to Martin Hurson, 1986.

Michael Oatley.

To Susan, Ben, Sam
Emmeline and Bob

First Published 1997

Copyright by Peter Taylor 1997

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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