Volume 33, Number 7 · April 24, 1986
Ireland: The Mirage of Peace
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland
by John M. Feehan
The Permanent Press, 152 pp., $16.95
Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland is a 152-page piece of propaganda on behalf of the Provisional IRA. It consists in about equal parts of hagiography and bad history. The hagiographical part, of which I shall have more to say, concerns the story of Bobby Sands—the young IRA man, and elected MP for Fermanagh, whose death on hunger strike, in Long Kesh Prison, in May 1981, attracted worldwide media attention. Mr. Feehan's treatment of the story contains little information about Sands, and almost nothing about the activities which led to his arrest and sentence. The 'historical' part of the book applies the usual techniques of propagandist historiography: highlighting of enemy atrocities; failing to mention those of one's own side; converting a far-fetched interpretation of a given event into the narrated event itself, and so on.
Review, 6982 words
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