McGUIRE AND THE IRA

*To Take Arms'. By Maria McGuire. Macmillan £1.95. Maria McGuire is not, as her confessions confirm, of any special intrinsic interest.

And her book is, in many ways, politically naive — especially her ceaseless blaming of ex-IRA Chief-of-Staff Sean MacStiofain, as an individual, for the movement's major failures.

It may be true, as she describes him in 'To Take Arms', that he is a narrow-minded, ruthless, Catholic — with a capital C.

But if he was always ready to 'go with the movement' in the north, it was not merely because he 'knew nothing' but the bomb and the bullet.

There was more to it than that. In the Six Counties, IRA militarism was a direct consequence of the character of its political programme.

Miss McGuire's book makes it plain that the short-lived truce of June 1972 was the beginning of the end for the Provisionals in the north.

The southern leadership thought violence could be used to force the British government to agree to a political solution in the Six Counties which would favour them.

Until the June truce the northern command believed the same thing. But everything was changed by Belfast leader Seamus Twomey's historic statement in the middle of the lull that the British had nothing to give.

MacStiofain, Twomey, and Sean Keenan in Derry, saw that they could either settle for what they had (which was broadly what they began with) or fight. They chose to fight.

But in doing so, their tactics increasingly achieved what the political wing in Dublin had feared all along - the erosion of their power base by the alienation of moderate Catholics.

Ultimately Miss McGuire took sides with those who were prepared to see violence used in the defence of their homes but not as an instrument of mass terror.

She discloses that one of the key factors behind the Provisionals' frantic seeking after the political deal which was supposed to follow the June truce was the perpetual fear that terror alone would lose the IRA more supporters than it won.

On the eve of the truce, brought about by visits and most of all telephone conversations between David O'Connell and Tory •Ulster chief William Whitelaw, the political wing looked poised for a coU Connell claimed, to have coup.

But then came the Twomey bombshell and the announcement that shooting had started again in the north.

With no solutions to the old problem of votes, jobs and houses in sight, and with the need to defend ghetto areas from attack greater than ever, the predominance of the bomb and the bullet - and with them MacStiofain's wing of the IRA-was inevitable.

The political solution Miss McGuire and her friends sought was always a possibility in theory. But at no time could it be brought about by the essential sectarian nationalism of the IRA and Sinn Fein.

In the light of Miss McGuire's disclosures, the 1972 Ard Ffeis (Sinn Fein Conference) must be seen as a desperate last-ditch bid by the political wing to recover the position by holding out olive branches to the Protestants. Inevitably they failed.

From beginning to end the missing link was the party and programme of revolutionary Marxism which could alone unite both sections of the Ulster working class together and with their fellow workers in Britain against the common enemy-the Tory government.

The remainder of Miss McGuire's largely anecdotal account of her year in the IRA does at least perform the invaluable service of stripping bare the political opportunism and military amateurism of the organization she served.