War and an Irish Town

by Eamonn McCann

McCann’s account of what it is like to grow up a Catholic in a Northern Irish ghetto—first published in 1974—quickly became a classic account of the feelings generated by British rule. The author was at the center of events in Derry which first brought Northern Ireland to world attention. He witnessed the gradual transformation of the civil rights movement from a mild campaign for “British Democracy” to an all-out military assault on the British state. This book describes the people involved in the war, gives an account of the springs of the "Catholic" opposition, shows what their world was like and how their background affected the daily conduct of events. McCann gets beyond the rhtoroic of the organized groups to the real people involved—people who are not so different from those in any other British town.

Genres: History, Ireland, Nonfiction, Politics, Irish Literature, Memoir, Biography

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Dayna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent review of a socialist position on Irish nationalism. My favorite part, as an American reader, was McCann's personal recounting of events in Derry as he experienced them. It felt close, and his ability to be self-deprecating at times when viewing decisions in retrospect made this a history that will feel familiar to any leftist who knows the struggle of trying to build something new. The book ends with important and clarifying political context that cuts through some of the romanticism that American leftists especially tend to have re: Ireland.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being a Trotskyite from the North of Ireland… talk about sectarianism inception! Eamonn McCann has fought for justice in Derry, the north’s second largest city, for decades, and has plenty of stories and even more analysis to show for it. It’s lightly surreal- I’ve read more than one account of organizing victories and woes in my day. I don’t think it’s too much to say there’s something of a Trotskyite “house style” of these things that transcends the many divisions within Trotskyism: the minute attention paid to organizational structural detail, the occasional doctrinal sermon aside, the inevitable partial success that would have been a fuller one had others listened to the voice of the people/the organizers doing the writing. What’s surreal is reading about the positional warfare of organizing committees and agitprop in Derry while an actual war, the Troubles, was starting at the same time.

There’s something ridiculous about these small sectarian groups grousing each other and puffing up their importance as though their position vis a vis the massive explosion of sectarian — real sects, with centuries of blood behind them, not the sunderings of Internationals of yesteryear — violence. But, as McCann shows, it’s not like the IRA or for that matter the Protestant paramilitaries were immune from the same sort of doctrinal, strategic, and personal wrangling. At the end of the day, it was small groups of people trying to harness an explosion of popular energy using the best tools they had.

McCann is a good storyteller and is surprisingly generous for a guy with an axe to grind. Unlike other socialists I’ve seen speaking on the Irish question, he manages to make his points against the IRA — ramifiers of sectarianism, insufficient attention paid to class — without missing the obvious part of their appeal. That appeal was simple and practical: the IRA, and particularly the Provisional wing, were the ones ready(ish) and willing to fight when the Protestant mobs came howling to destroy the Catholic communities that had dared to peacefully campaign for their rights (inspired by the black freedom struggle in the US). The various Irish socialist groups from the Labor party on down weren’t and never really were, some small guerrilla cells aside. McCann never denies this, even as he does something of a victory lap in his 2018 introduction about how the Good Friday Accords wrote sectarianism into the constitution of the North and that we’re no closer to a united, socialist (which even the IRA claimed to want, though they played a complicated game with red-baiting) Ireland than we ever were.

The memoirs part, of the rise of the civil rights struggle, the turn on the part of the Orange establishment and the British military to armed violence and the Catholic people’s response, and the atrocity of Bloody Sunday, is probably the best part of the book, due to McCann’s keen storytelling instincts. His analysis of the political economy of Ireland is also pretty good, though not being an expert on the field I can’t judge it too much. His most controversial claim, it would seem to me, is the claim that the Protestants in the North were encouraged to fear union with the rest of Ireland by the ways in which the southern Irish elite, led by walking disaster Eamon de Valera, cuddled up to the Catholic Church, letting them set much of social policy and covering for the political elite’s betrayal of the Irish working class and embrace of capitalism. By insufficiently distancing themselves from the “Green Tories” of the south, the IRA only made everything worse, appearing to be an army for Catholic theocracy to the working class Protestants who “should” have been on the side of overthrowing their social arrangements.

McCann is persuasive here but it gets to the basic problem of class-reductionist approaches to Ireland, or anywhere really. It’s ironic- if anyone should get that sectarianism is a real, material force, it should be Trotskyites, of all people! Did the Protestants of the North of Ireland really require lessons to hate Catholics? The “psychic wage” paid to the Protestant workers by Orange supremacy is never taken into account, though McCann is honest enough to acknowledge that the Protestant working class, presented with the tableau of their police beating the shit out of Catholic working class people fighting for basic civil rights, backed the cops every single time, and soon enough participated in pogroms against the Catholics. That would seem to suggest something not entirely dependent on economic self-interest, or anyway, something that complicates self-interest.

But, in the way of leftist pains-in-the-ass, McCann stubbornly points to issues that aren’t going away by waving the green flag or settling for Good Friday. He persuasively argues that the class structure as it exists on both sides of the line in Ireland can’t allow for a prosperous and free nonsectarian working class- too much of the pie is eaten up by the bourgeoisie, and you’ll seldom find a more crooked and backwards bourgeoisie than either the Green or Orange Tories of Ireland. That the Republic is basically a parking lot for Apple’s loose cash at this point makes it clear enough. To be honest, I don’t see how an independent united Ireland — which I was raised to believe in and still think is a sine qua non for a just future there — can, on its own, sustain itself as a modern, prosperous economy. The only answer is internationalism, as McCann calls for- revolution not just in Ireland but in Britain and everywhere else too. 32 counties of independent socialism is good- add 92 more from Britain and then you’re really cooking with gas. Here’s to the day. ****’

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 5 out of 5]

As good as its reputation suggests: extraordinarily skilful in moving between the big politics and history and the war as it affects one particular place known intimately, and so well written, with its humour, honesty, self-criticism, detail and sweep, and its refusal, for all its many jokes and farcical scenes, to draw caricatures (the thread on how the 'Orange machine' has to constantly reconstitute itself and discipline the Protestant working class every time it demonstrate independent thought and action was unexpected and welcome). Reading it is one of those rare moments where if you're from that tradition but have moved away from it, you realise 'Trotskyism is good, not bad'.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book about 20 or 25 years ago when the "Troubles" in Ireland were still a big, tragic mess. Thank God that’s pretty much history (or at least appears to be). It’s an enlightening read about the lousy situation the Catholics in Ulster faced, what it was like to grow up in that, how the mess developed over time, how the authorities often did the absolute wrong thing, and how ordinary people almost naturally and necessarily became radicalized. Taking human nature as something relatively constant and transposing the ingredients to any other place and time, we get a pretty disturbing picture of the possibilities. Or put in another way, you can extract some general principles from the Irish troubles, look around the world, change a few terms such as Ulster to Kenya or the Balkans, and the underlying patterns are pretty consistent. It’s all too explicable. It amazes me that this Enlightenment notion of the perfectibility of human nature wasn’t among the millions killed off by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and our other 20th Century greats. In his 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech John Steinbeck said, “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” What a fool.

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eamonn McCann wasn't just an eyewitness of the civil rights movement in the North of Ireland — he was a young protagonist of the Battle of the Bogside (1969) and of Bloody Sunday (1972). But McCann was also a sharp interpreter of the conflict.

War and an Irish Town, first published in 1973, is part memoir, part Marxist historical analysis. The first half is an exciting and often humorous account of the riots. The second half is an analysis how Irish capitalism developed under colonial rule and partition.

The book challenges the common view of the "Troubles" as Catholics vs. Protestants or Republicans vs Unionists. McCann explains that these two bourgeois factions, despite their sharp differences, always shared a fundamental interest in maintaining capitalist class rule. Each side depends on the conflict to keep their own workers in line.

Though sympathetic to the Republican cause — not so much because of his Catholic background, but because of his socialist convictions — his goal is a socialist Ireland. This would require a revolutionary working-class movement capable of breaking Protestant workers from the Unionist coalition.

A few leaders of the civil rights movement, including McCann, became Trotskyists. Today, 56 years after he joined the barricades of Free Derry, he remains active as a fighter against oppression — in fact I just saw him on social media protesting against anti-Palestinian repression in Berlin.

[Allan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had this been purely a social history of the rise of the Civil Rights movement in 1960s Derry, and a portrayal of the descent into anarchy, first with the Battle of the Bogside, then with the rise of the Provisionals in the early 70s, this would've been a solid 4 star for me, but I became lost at times in the latter stages of the book, in which McCann pontificates on a number of subjects.

That said, this is definitely a worthwhile read to get a feeling for the inequality suffered by the majority in Derry in the 60s, and to gain an understanding as to how these injustices were combatted by the wronged population.

[Rachel (rachelreadsagain) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 1974 account of the then-ongoing Northern Ireland conflict provides an accessible Marxist analysis of events from 1968-1973, and the centuries of history that formed the “Orange machine” that ran the Northern Ireland state. The book begins with McCann’s upbringing in Derry, then charts the civil rights movement and beginning of outright conflict in the late 1960s before moving back to the 19th century to begin his analysis of all Ireland capitalism. This might sound like an overly laboured analysis but the fact that nearly all of McCann’s political analysis (especially on the Republic of Ireland) holds up after 48 years shows otherwise. He particularly nails how alienating Protestant working class people from their own interests and Catholic counterparts has always been essential to the existence of the Northern Ireland state. Further, he establishes that true anti-sectarianism and anti-partitionism in Ireland north and south has always been resisted by the ruling classes to preserve the economic interests of capital (namely landowners, industrial barons, the ascendancy class, and contemporary private enterprise). Some reviewers have criticised the book for jumping around in time but I found it fine. The text mirrors McCann’s manner of speaking in real life: with sharp wit, a dark, wry humour and a sense of the long arc of history. I would recommend this to any Marxists looking for an accessible “origins of the Troubles” read, and to anyone already familiar with Troubles 101 who is ready to read a deep dive on class in the six counties context. Anyone who enjoyed or wanted to read The Price of My Soul by Bernadette Devlin (highly recommend) will also love this book. Thankfully copies of this book are still available online in multiple editions: I recommend looking on eBay or World of Books. // completely arbitrary review: 5/5 // source: I was given this secondhand paperback copy as a gift by friends

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting account of the beginning of the Irish "troubles" in Derry in 1969. In my opinion, the book is marred by the author's doctrinaire socialism. The tendentious introduction, which criticizes the Good Friday Agreement, infuriated me. But the rest of the book is full of information and does not pull punches on sectarianism on both sides. One long chapter takes us through Irish history from partition to the start of the troubles. Of course, at the end the author declares "The future of Ireland lies with the small but at last steadily growing forces of Marxism."

[Peter Colclasure · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was originally published in the mid-‘70s by left-wing organizer and Derry native Eamonn McCann. The Troubles were in full swing, with the Good Friday Agreement still decades away. My edition was a recent reprint, however, which included a new forward by the author explaining events since 1998.

On the one hand, this book explained the causes of The Troubles better than anything I’ve read previously. On the other hand, it’s less “about” The Troubles than an analysis (through a socialist lens) of the origins of the conflict. A better title might have been “Labor History and an Irish Town,” because a large chunk of the book details various unions and strikes and wage increases and factory closures throughout Ireland from 1880 onward. Honestly, it’s kind of boring. Specialized readers might enjoy it, perhaps if you’re writing a master’s thesis or something.

The first section was the most engaging, a memoir of sorts, briefly describing the author’s upbringing in Derry, and providing a narrative of events during the late 1960s. Most books about the Troubles focus on the military campaign, the Provos and the British military, the shooting and bombing, but this book was focused on the Civil Rights Movement, the various left-wing organizations operating in Northern Ireland at the time, and as such you get a lot of descriptions of meetings and committees and internecine squabbles. It’s kind of like the Troubles reported through the lens of your local school board.

As anyone who has ever been admonished by a Trotskyite on Twitter to “read more theory” will tell you, leftists politics can get tedious and didactic fairly quickly. Still, the framework for understanding the Troubles provided by McCann was compelling.

Most understandings of the conflict (including my own) frame it as Catholics vs. Protestants, Nationalists, vs. Unionists, Ireland vs. Britain. This isn’t totally inaccurate, but it’s simplified and limited. McCann argues persuasively that the main consequence of sectarianism was to prevent the working classes, both Catholic and Protestant, from realizing their common interest. It’s similar to a class-based analysis of racism in America: how the inability of working-class Black and white communities to unite politically was awfully convenient for the interests of power and money. This is not to say that capitalism is to blame for racism or Northern Irish sectarianism, as some leftists will argue. I personally think that’s going too far. It simply means that the factory owners and politicians were more than happy to encourage the bigotry that was already there, and disincentivized from doing anything about it.

Because most books about the Troubles focus on the military aspect, it was nice to get the perspective of the Civil Rights groups. There were many— the Nationalists, various flavors of the Labour Party, the Civil Rights Association and Housing Action Committee and Citizens Action Committee, and People’s Democracy. They all overlapped and shared members and it’s a muddle. What was it about the 1960s politics that lead, across the globe, to this endless proliferation of alphabet-soup committees and groups and meetings and factional maneuvering?

All these groups shared goals, broadly, but they differed in tactics and constituency and style, and petty disputes arose as a result. These power struggles were complicated and also boring.

Another reason why I’d say this book is for the specialized reader is because it presumes knowledge. There is some discussion of the B Specials, but no explanation of who they were, and even after a visit to Wikipedia I’m still foggy on the relationship between them and the RUC, or how they fit into the overall mosaic of state authority. I have no idea what an election agent is. If you’re looking for an introduction to the Troubles, I’d start elsewhere. This book was aimed at people living in Northern Ireland, in 1973, who knew the basics, obviously.

Side note: I think it’s quaint how in Ireland and Britain streets have bottoms and entrances. The entrance to Rossville Street or the bottom of William Street. As an American, I really have no idea what this means.

The description of Bloody Sunday included some graphic and visceral details that I hadn’t known, the specifics of how certain victims were shot and killed. But the military side of the conflict is largely drawn in broad strokes, rather than minute detail. He’ll mention a woman who was blinded by a rubber bullet, for instance, but we never hear much about her, what her life was like afterwards, the events leading up to the blinding. Often there’s a laundry list of atrocity and horror, but not a narrative.

As I said, the latter half of the book gets a bit dry and academic. I’m not sure how many readers will be interested in 1880s Ulster trade unionism, but the gist is interesting, that sectarian bigotry was intentionally stoked by wealthy industrialists and business owners to discourage working class Protestants and Catholics from getting too cozy with one another and cooperating on their shared interest in labor rights. There were strikes in which Catholic and Protestant workers equally participated, and then, after partition, there weren’t. The machinery of the Orange Order served its purpose, and the owners of linen factories and shipyard could go on gleefully extorting workers.

Lastly, even though a lot of the material is dry, McCann is a great writer, frequently witty and funny and astute. Here are some quotes I liked:


Ours was a teeming, crumbling area of ugly, tiny, terrace houses, mean streets where men stood in sullen groups at the corner while their wives went out to work and children skipped to songs of cheerful hatred.


The area was raising a sudden generation of kamikaze children whose sport it was to hurtle down Rossville Street, stones in hand, to take on the British army.


[The Provisional IRA] had become, by any standards, a brilliantly efficient guerrilla army. Now that the Officials had ‘given up’ they claimed recognition as the sole inheritors of the Republican tradition, a status which, once assumed, canon of its nature be subjected to democratic contestation. . . They were the front-line hooligans of 1969 in arms, young and urgent and now absolutely sure of themselves with all the arrogance of their age and their race.


It is often said that Irish people pay too much attention to history. This is not true. Irish people pay very little attention to history. Some Irish people do pay attention to a mixture of half-truths and folk mythology about the past. . . But underlying all the mythology there is a deep stratum of truth. The Irish people, particularly the Catholic Irish people, were exploited and oppressed for hundreds of years by Britain. The overwhelming majority of them were born in misery and reared in squalor. They lived from day to day, fighting to ear some dignity from life, most of them finally to die amid the ugliness in which they first saw the light of day.


The Unionist leaders as pragmatic men were not against Catholics because of Catholic dogma, the Virgin Mary or the transubstantiation of bread and wine. They encouraged anti-Catholicism because they wanted to stay in power and thereby to preserve the economic position of their class. The Catholics had to be browbeaten into submission in order that the state could exist. The Protestant lower orders had to be bought off by the marginal privileges accruing from Catholic second-class citizenship.


It can seriously be doubted whether the Northern state could have survived the first two decades of its existence had not the ‘Free State’ become increasingly repellent to Protestants. The Unionist Party had to fight unceasingly and at times desperately to hold the support of the majority of Protestants. That it succeeded was mainly due to the fact that the only alternative to the Union with Britain appeared to be sectarian Catholic rule from Dublin.


The Free Trade Agreement provided for the dismantling of all economic barriers between the two countries over a period of ten years. It thus increased the dependence of the Southern economy on British capital. Not that that upset the nouveaux semi-riches who, barnacle-like, were beginning to encrust Irish parliamentary politics. As output continued to grow the whoops of delight in select lounge bars around St Stephen’s Green in Dublin would have given the uniformed passer-by to understand that the Free State middle class had at last shrugged off its sexual inhibition.


There were bourgeois visionaries—some such exist—in the early sixties who dreamed of the Six and the 26 Counties peacefully coming together, eventually to form some sort of Federal Ireland, under the benign gaze, not to mention the economic stranglehold, of Great Britain. It was not to work out like that. There is more to Irish politics than economics and reason.


The [Orange] machine existed to discriminate and arrange gerrymanders. It had been created in order to guarantee the continued ascendancy of Protestant business and landed interests and that was the only way in which the guarantee could have been delivered. If it could not deliver minor privilege to the Protestant masses it could not deliver the Protestant masses on polling day. The Orange machine, in a real sense, was Northern Ireland. To attack it or to attempt to take away its power was to weaken the state itself. The very boundaries of the state had, after all, been determined by calculating what area the machine could effectively control. If the machine had not been clamped on to Catholic areas the state might never have existed.


Obviously, the idea put about in August 1969 that the army had come because British cabinet ministers were upset by the prospect of innocent people being slaughtered in considerable numbers is nonsense. The British army came because British interests in Ireland were threatened. When the slaughter of innocents had not threatened British interests in the twenties and thirties for example—there had been no intervention.

[Joe O'Donnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an updated edition of “War and an Irish Town”, the veteran civil rights campaigner, activist and journalist Eamonn McCann’s account – first published in 1974 – of the outbreak of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and the province’s descent into three decades of sectarian violence. More specifically, it is an attempt to reframe ‘The Troubles’ in a class-based, internationalist analysis, and to place the Northern Ireland conflict in a (broadly Marxist) context beyond the standard dichotomies of Republican versus Unionist, Catholic versus Protestant, and Green versus Orange.

“War and an Irish Town” is very much an outsider’s history of the conflict, and as one of the ultimate outsiders of ‘The Troubles’ Eamonn McCann has barely a good word to say about any side or, indeed, anybody. Writing from an unabashedly revolutionary socialist position, McCann excoriates practically every leading figure and every political movement within Irish Nationalism and Ulster Unionism from the 150 years up to the outbreak of the conflict in 1969. Practically no major figure – whether they’re from Conservative Catholic Nationalism, sectarian ‘Big House’ Unionism, the British or Irish Free State political establishments, the Roman Catholic Clergy, or liberal centrists – escapes the wrath of McCann or one of his habitual charges of duplicity, hypocritical piety, spinelessness, or selling-out the working classes. The sainted John Hume gets numerous belts of McCann’s crozier and even such pillars of the left-wing pantheon as Jim Larkin and Bernadette Devlin don’t escape criticism. For any student of Irish history, it is by turns rage-inducing and wildly entertaining in its acerbity.

But, the real value of “War and an Irish Town” is that as a leading player in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, Eamonn McCann is a frontline witness to the outbreak of ‘The Troubles’. He provides a compelling, convincing account of how the objectives of the Civil Rights Association were firstly ignored then thwarted by the Unionist political elite, the organisation then battered off the streets by the RUC. Te Stormont political establishment reacted initially with repression before completely losing control of the situation, as the British Army were sent into the province (supposedly to “restore order”) and the Provisional IRA emerged as a violent, insurgent force. McCann is also excellent on the long-term roots of the conflict, and is particularly astute in describing the post-partition evolution of “the apparatus of Orangeism”, describing it as “(that) remarkable political machine which the unionist leaders had built ... grinding and crushing all opposition, siphoning into itself the spoils of its discrimination, and automatically disgorging them to those who had to be bought”.

There are undoubtedly more impartial, more comprehensive, more intricately-detailed histories of the Northern Ireland conflict (something that Eamonn McCann graciously acknowledges in his newly-published coda to this edition). But it is because it represents a voice from the fringes – or, at the very least, a voice from outside the standard sectarian bubbles – that “War and an Irish Town” is rarely less than interesting, consistently caustic, and a welcome counterblast to many of the traditional orange-green narratives about ‘The Troubles’.

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good overview of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970's, particularly in Derry. Eamonn McCann was a socialist organizer at the time, so he has a firsthand account of what it was like trying to improve conditions for the Catholic working class.
I read the "new" edition from the 90's, which McCann had added a preface to that went over some of the change (or lack of change) since the 70's. I thought this was the best part of the book, as it was a clear analysis of why things hadn't worked out and why, from an economic standpoint, they had stayed that way.
His account of Derry started with what he experienced as a child and young adult but the next section was a play-by-play of several years of struggle that difficult to follow if you didn't know all the actors involved and didn't have a strong foundation of Irish history. I was kind of lost for most of it, but I did appreciate his analysis of why certain things turned out the way they did, why certain actions succeeded and others failed, and how the ruling classes of both Northern Ireland and South Ireland had worked together to create divisions along religious lines rather than class lines.
The section after that goes into a lot of Irish history that would have been helpful to read before the previous section, so if you read it, I suggest going straight to that part (Part 3 I believe) before reading Part 2. The final section goes back to Derry in the 70's and ends with a call to socialist action to unite the working class and create better conditions for all Irish people, Catholic and Protestant, under a Marxist party. I think the organization could have been more effective, as it was at times not clear what the purpose of the book was and it seemed to go into such detail that only someone who had lived through it would have a deep response to the section when he is giving the play-by-play of the Troubles in Derry.
I learned a lot of Irish history from this book and I was glad it was told from a Marxist perspective, which to me is very easy to understand. I found it very interesting how both the capitalist classes of South Ireland and of Northern Ireland benefited from the partition in opposite ways, and how this contributed to fomenting religious division between Protestants and Catholics. McCann also makes a strong case for the church's involvement in Southern Irish politics and how it stifled any chance of a unified Ireland because it furthered the idea that Protestants in a united Ireland would be forced to live under papal rule. I never knew that the Catholic church had been so fundamentalist as to try and ban dancing, although I did know a little about the censorship and of course the lack of access to contraceptives, abortion, or divorce.
This was an excellent book for anyone interested in the Troubles, though I would definitely recommend starting with the historical part (Part 3), reading to the end, then going back and reading parts 1 and 2, then reading the Preface of the new edition. To me that would be much more straightforward. McCann is a good writer, and I found his sarcasm and snarkiness amusing at times - luckily his snide comments were limited and didn't get in the way of his excellent analysis, and added a personal connection to a story that could have been extremely dry.

[Lisa Wynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eamonn McCann’s ‘War and an Irish Town’ was a great read on so many levels. Firstly, the eyewitness account of the situation in Derry in the late sixties and early seventies is hugely engrossing. Significant episodes and shifting moods are recounted in a lively, compelling, and urgent manner. The latter sections of the book critique the “Orange Machine” and present a chronology of politics on the island from Partition up to the time of writing. What I like about the book is the transparency of McCann’s personal politics (and therefore biases) and the perspective it gives him in his chronological analysis of political movements on the island. His socialism is a fascinating frame through which to consider the local political organising of the period, and I found his analysis of constitutional and party politics in the Republic in the midcentury period interesting and original. His expressed hopes for the future may have been somewhat met by the Belfast Agreement in 1997, but as the North currently languishes without a functioning government due to one Unionist faction withholding from power sharing, his final calls to action for solidarity and governance sound as relevant now as they were in the 70s.

A recommended read for anyone seeking to learn more about Northern Ireland and/or the context of the Troubles.

[Leila · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first impression of the book is that the author is just angry, which is absolutely understandable and justified but I thought it wouldn’t come through so clearly as it did from the very start. I did learn quite a bit from the book and from the author’s perspective but in many parts (in part because it was written a long time ago) it was based on the author’s opinion instead of evidence. In some cases opinions are all we will ever have but having a more thorough analysis would have been helpful instead of saying killings on one side were justified and on the other were not. The only thing I could fully agree with the author throughout the book was when he basically says that “everyone around were idiots at some point”. I’ve lived in NI for almost 9 years and it’s shame that some people can’t work together for the sake of their own country and all communities in it, especially when most of England doesn’t even know or care we exist.

[Don Boselovic · Rating 3 out of 5]

The value of the book lies in its analysis of the economic, social and sectarian forces at play in Ireland in the 20th century. The author is equally critical of the players on all sides but I found his strident tone at times lessened the weight of his thesis.

The title of the book is completely misleading, as only about a third of the book deals directly with Derry. The context of the events in Derry in the late 60's and early 70's (Parts 1 and 2) would have been more easily explained and understood had the author first presented the survey of developments since 1916 presented in Parts 3 and 4.

Lastly, as someone whose knowledge of Modern Ireland is somewhat limited, I would have benefitted from a list of the major players and their political affiliations at the beginning of the book and an index at the back of the book.

[Simon B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth reading alone for it's evocative account of the stirring mass movement against sectarian Northern Ireland police and the British Army in Derry in the late 60s/early 70s. I was less impressed with other parts of the book. McCann's critique of Irish Republicanism, the Provos & Sinn Fein is a lot more sophisticated than that of some other Trotskyists. But there is a reason his alternative of a 'class politics' to unite Protestant & Catholic workers never caught on in the 1970s. Sinn Fein's approach then, and subsequently, is not above criticism but has ironically been a lot more materialist and grounded than the formulaic kind of 'Marxism' that tries to wish away the National Question with abstractions.

[Andrew Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting with an evocative first hand account of the uprising in Derry in the late 60s and early 70s - peppered with McCann's sardonic wit, and then leavened by a historic account of the origins and impact of partition. The first part is the strongest, with the latter at times a bit harder work if you are less familiar with the intricate histories of the parties and individuals involved. But still definitely recommended.

[Robin Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fascinating look at the decades leading up to the troubles through a socialist lens. This is actually the first book on the troubles that I’ve read that actually goes into how sectarianism was constructed by unionists to maintain power structures that were being threatened by the catholic population. Particularly enjoyed hearing the telling of this history from one of the key players of Ireland’s civil rights movement.

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have some major issues.
1. Although class is perhaps the best filter through which to understand the situation, it's certainly not the only one. The book is so ideologically rigid, it reads a bit like a students thesis.
2. I have grew up in Ireland during the troubles but still found his writing style hard to follow.
3. The manner in which he delivers information is almost rambling.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good but in the wrong order. The personal experience about The Troubles in the early 70s ends at chapter 3 or 4 and ends up on a chapters long history of The Troubles starting in the late 1800s.

Interesting enough but not what I was expecting. Good for schools or historians, little less so for personal consumption.

[Justin H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recommend reading this book in your part sequence: part 1, 4, 2, 3, 5. This helps explain some views that some people, like myself, may not know of. It also helps give more context for the lived experience from part 2.

[Michael Pittuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book read this year (so far). An interesting snapshot of Derry and it's rise to prominence during The Troubles. It's clearly partisan (which, if I'm honest, is what I look for in books on the subject) but also honest and humourous. A must read for anyone interested in the subject.

[Sidsel Sander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rigtig interessant bog, der selvfølgelig skal læses som et partsindlæg, men som ikke desto mindre er både reflekteret og velskrevet - samt meget ærlig om sin intention.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic, and deservedly so. Part memoir, part analysis on where things stand in the North (in 1974 anyway). Compelling personal stories and shrewd class analysis. And lots of great put downs.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic book

[Jamie Bookboy Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is decent but the last part is just typical Trotskyite shite where apparently he knew better than everyone else and everyone else was wrong except him because he’s so clever

[Eleanor McCaughey]

"There is a war in Ireland because capitalism, to establish and preserve itself, created conditions which made war inevitable. Essentially there is no other reason. There rarely is for war."

[Finn Penter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, exciting and crystal clear Marxist analysis of a very complicated history that many historians misunderstand

[Killian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite the read. Brilliantly written about the build up to the troubles, very understandable

[Freya Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best account of the Troubles I've read. Political clarifying while including the real human stories of those oppressed.

[Sarah Ensor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author had intended the title to be War in an Irish Town but the Government at the time intervened. It wasn't a war they said. It must have meant a great deal to them that they would try to prevent publication of a Penguin Special by a Derry journalist. But then the Catholic majority lived and worked in worse conditions than their protestant neighbours who themselves had worse wages, housing and rights than their fellow workers in Britain - such are the wages of sectarianism that helped keep the British government in charge of this corner of Ireland with its highly profitable shipyards.

McCann described what it was like to experience that sectarianism in ordinary lives and the hopes for better that the civil rights movement there created.

But British Paratroopers shot and murdered ordinary people in Derry to destroy the growing civil rights movement in 1972. They'd practiced in a slightly smaller massacre of Catholics in Ballymurphy the year before. Having shot the unity of ordinary people off the streets, that might have challenged it's rule, the British government showed it preferred mayhem and sectarian murder of its own citizens to any chance of democracy and peace.

So it can't be a war if the state is murdering its own people, can it?