Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh

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This is an incredibly important piece of work, and this most recent reread has proven to me that it's aged impeccably well, too. Focusing on both issues of his homeland and further afield, he seeks to translate stories of society to a photographic audience.

A poor condition book can still make a good reading copy but is generally not collectible unless the item is very scarce. The focus on South Armagh is key, as Harnden emphasizes the region's rebellious history, splintered ideology and recalcitrant personalities that helped escalate the violence, shift IRA attacks to the British homeland and threaten lasting peace -- in spite of overarching British/Sinn Fein political agreements.

He was one of the first journalists at the scene of the IRA's Docklands bomb and, after moving to Belfast, reported on the second IRA ceasefire, the Good Friday Agreement and the Omagh bombing as well numerous explosions, shootings, riots, marches and political crises. Harnden constructs a picture of the area as being particularly lawless, prone to violence and a 'place apart'. South Armagh was described as "Bandit Country" by Merlyn Rees when he was Northern Ireland Secretary, and for nearly three decades it has been the most dangerous posting in the world for a British soldier. Given the huge temperamental and historical differences between South Armagh on the one hand and the Belfast and Derry brigades, you leave the book surprised that Tom "Slab" Murphy and Gerry Adams were ever in the same organisation, let alone that South Armagh stuck with the Adams/McGuinness leadership through the change to a political approach. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

Harnden appears as obsessed with the alleged main player in South Armagh, Thomas 'Slab' Murphy, as his security force contacts. At 15 years old I was finally deemed old enough and mature enough to be able to read the book with its context and not just the "up the 'RA" kind of attitude that I had been exposed to in school, and since I came into possession of this book I must have read it maybe 10-12 times.In conclusion, Bandit Country has become a bookcase essential for anyone with an interest in the centuries-old Anglo-Irish conflict, or even those who have an interest in counter-insurgency matters in general. Still, the level of violence, murder, and lawlessness carried out by the Provisional IRA in South Armagh was off the charts.

Patterson shows us how the militarised boundary line of old has morphed into an invisible and semi-wild frontier, where the ghosts of a thirty-year war continue to haunt the ‘ceasefire generation’. I think a further book must exist somewhere which may shine a light on how far divisions have been healed as it seems incredulous to think that things are now chunky dory as the separations between community's ran deep at times through the period recorded.The Irish Republican History Museum in Belfast has over 5000 artifacts that chronicle the history of resistance to the British occupation of Ireland. A dual British and US citizen, he spent a decade as a Royal Navy officer before becoming a journalist. He tries to make the case that, even pre-partition, the Fewes area, which includes South Armagh, was quite a bellicose proposition for the British colonial invaders to conquer.