Brits: The War against the IRA cannot be considered fully without reference to Peter Taylor's two other books in his trilogy on the Irish Troubles, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein and Loyalists. Although these are, in a sense, books to accompany the three BBC television series of the same name, they stand perfectly happily on their own. By definition, they offer more time and space for detailed consideration of the issues arising from the 'dirty war' which has disfigured the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic since 1969. Most people believe, or at least hope, the war has been over since 1998. Yet the riots in Belfast in July 2001, the IRA's persistent refusal to decommission arms and the grave danger of the collapse of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement do not inspire hope. The reader of Brits: The War Against the IRA and the companion volumes is reminded that Peter Taylor, despite his obvious wish to the contrary, may have analysed only another phase of the Irish agony.

On the other hand, this may be too pessimistic. What Brits: The War Against the IRA demonstrates so lucidly is the way in which the door to negotiation between the Provisional IRA (PIRA) and the British Government was never closed completely. Certain behind-the-scenes optimists like the senior MI6 officers Frank Steele and Michael Oatley for example, kept open lines of communication through the darkest times of the Troubles. These men will probably never receive much public accolade for their work. Yet the Good Friday Agreement could not have happened if Oatley's 'bamboo pipe' and other semi-official and sometimes completely unofficial means of contact to well-meaning intermediaries and more flexible members of the terrorist movements had not been maintained.

Indeed, 'talks with terrorists', so decried by most of the British press and denied by British political leaders for most of the three decades of 'The Troubles', had always been possible in one form or another. For example, in 1972 Labour leader Harold Wilson and shadow Northern Ireland spokesman Merlyn Rees met three leading Provisionals in Dublin to try and broker an extension to the PIRA ceasefire. William Whitelaw, Conservative Northern Ireland Secretary under Heath, also met PIRA representatives, including the young Gerry Adams, in 1972. Both these efforts at putting out peace feelers failed. Yet the fact that it might be possible to parley at some point in the future was clearly established in this year.

The desire of some in the Labour hierarchy to discuss 'possibilities' with terrorists did not make them any less inclined to crack down on terrorism when in power again between 1974 and 1979. In December 1975, Merlyn Rees as Northern Ireland Secretary did end the controversial - and arguably counter-productive - policy of internment of suspected terrorists. Yet he also backed the building of the H-Block prison complexes which took on a totemic significance for republicans during the 'dirty protests' and subsequent hunger strikes of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Crucially, Rees and the Labour government also abolished 'special category status' for republican and loyalist prisoners who were convicted after 1 March 1976. This move was a key component of the 'criminalization' policy which premiers Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher would pursue with vigour. This would attempt to deprive the PIRA, INLA and loyalist paramilitaries of the 'Prisoner of War' status they had tried to fashion for themselves while in Long Kesh internment centre. Now, standard prison clothes would have to be worn and the command structure of an 'army' in a POW camp, with parades and saluting of 'officers' and flags would be swept away. As Taylor shows, this 'criminalization' policy failed because it led directly to the hunger strikes of 1980-81 and the subsequent martyrology surrounding Bobby Sands and the other nine convicted PIRA and INLA men who starved themselves to death. Taylor writes that, initially, 'the ending of the hunger strike was seen as a victory for the Iron Lady but ultimately it was a victory for the Iron Men'. Why? Because just prior to his death, Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone. On his death, his campaign agent, Owen Carron, was elected. In both by-elections the turnout had been about 88%. Here were two de facto IRA-Sinn Fein MPs. This marked the real renaissance of 'constitutional' republicanism as a force in Irish politics for the first time since the 1920s. If, much later, Gerry Adams could meet President Clinton, Martin McGuinness become Northern Ireland's Education Minister and both of these leading Sinn Fein-IRA activists be welcomed into Downing Street by Tony Blair as legitimate politicians, it is largely because of a process of 'politicisation' of militant republicanism which began as a result of the hunger strikes.

So tough talking and tough action against the IRA and INLA (and to some degree Loyalist terror groups) were never the preserve of Mrs Thatcher, yet she does emerge as the most implacable opponent of the PIRA in the British political establishment. Her absolute refusal to negotiate with the hunger strikers - "Crime is crime is crime." - enthused the security forces, unionists and much of the UK appalled at PIRA and INLA atrocities. The murders in 1979 of Airey Neave (one of Thatcher's closest friends and political allies), of eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint, and of Lord Mountbatten and three others in County Sligo heralded over a decade of implacable hostility between the Conservative government and the republicans. The failed effort to kill Mrs Thatcher and the entire Cabinet at Brighton in 1984 only raised Thatcher's anti-terrorist profile and, at the same time, boosted the determination of the republican terrorists to break British rule. Mrs Thatcher's strong support for 'robust' action by the security forces in Northern Ireland - especially the SAS - made any prospect of negotiation between her and republicans inconceivable. Of course, a further effort to wipe out the Cabinet was almost successful in 1991 when the PIRA mortared Downing Street. Yet John Major survived to be able to approve the long process, continued enthusiastically by Tony Blair to bring all the interested parties through the process which culminated in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Of course, even the 'Iron Lady' fell foul of the Unionists and Loyalists in 1985, with the Hillsborough Agreement of 1985 between the Irish and British governments. This crucial landmark in Anglo-Irish relations said in Article 1 that 'any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come about with the consent of the people of Northern Ireland.' Ian Paisley may have protested at high volume but the resultant improvement in the cross-border security arrangements helped the war against the republicans.

The SAS role in countering the PIRA/INLA threat is already well documented. Yet the author's account of the 'Det' or 14 Intelligence Company's activities in surveillance, information gathering and offensive counter-terrorist actions is possibly the most compelling aspect of this book, largely because it was not even acknowledged as existing for many years. The 'Det's' role was absolutely crucial in helping the RUC, MI5, the 'green' Army and SAS squeeze the republican terrorists so hard that it was clearly and finally understood that the 'armed struggle' would be of infinite duration if serious and flexible negotiation with the British government was not undertaken. Taylor has secured interviews with some very prominent and 'frontline' operatives who are, for obvious reasons, not always identified, but the result is a far clearer picture of covert activities against the republicans. Events such as the Loughall ambush of 1987 which resulted in the violent deaths of eight members of the notorious East Tyrone Brigade of the PIRA became highly potent symbols of the British government's determination to meet brute force with brute force. Of course, the republican movement saw it rather differently.

The PIRA and Sinn Fein had for a long time complained of the activities of 'SAS death squads'. It is hard to work out how they would then describe the activity of the South Armagh PIRA in 1976 when its members gunned down eleven Protestant civilians in 1976 at Kingsmills, having stopped their bus which was returning from the Glenanne textile factory. The occupants of the bus had among their number a Catholic workmate. The gunmen had called for any Catholics on board to get off first. Believing that they had been stopped by loyalist paramilitaries looking for 'Taigs' to murder, two of the Catholic worker's Protestant colleagues placed their hands on his to try and stop him moving out of the bus to what they assumed would be his death. Instead, the Catholic was told to run away and the massacre took place alongside the bus. Only Alan Black, a Protestant survived, despite having been shot eighteen times. Told in plain and unsentimental language, Taylor actually makes this account of common decency in the face of murderous sectarianism even more affecting. There were of course many similar acts of decency shown by Catholics to Protestants.

The inconsistency and myopia of republican and loyalist thinking on so many matters emerges strongly in this book. The Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, which left dead thirteen Catholics in Derry and made the British Army - especially the Parachute Regiment - permanently demonised in the minds of republicans and most constitutional nationalists, remains a controversial event. Whatever happened precisely - and Taylor tries very hard to be even-handed - it seems most of the dead simply were not active in terrorism. So how the PIRA and INLA would then be able to justify the indiscriminate bombings of pubs and shopping areas and cold-blooded shootings of unarmed civilians is perplexing.

To demand treatment as POWs, because they constituted an 'army' in a legitimate 'war', then refuse any such dignity to British soldiers and RUC policemen who fell into their hands, is another glaring inconsistency. PIRA and INLA (and UFF and UVF loyalists) wanted to be treated as POWs and had complained bitterly about abuses by the security forces, notably the 'Five Techniques' employed in interrogation in the early 1970s and similar methods used at Castlereagh detention centre and Gough barracks in 1977. Yet all security personnel in Northern Ireland knew that if they were captured by republicans they would be tortured and would be killed. It was definite and absolute. The Maze prison by contrast was full of republican and loyalist prisoners, who had lived to see (and possibly fight) another day.

In 1977, Peter Taylor made a programme entitled 'Inhuman and Degrading Treatment' on the subject of terrorist prisoners' human rights and was castigated for doing so by Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason and others. His broad argument, more implicit than explicit, is that when the state strays too far into the use of questionable methods it may end up inflaming the problem it seeks to solve and surrender any claim to the moral high ground. It is this commitment to the truth and decency, I am sure, which has allowed Taylor both in these books and across his whole career to forge working journalistic relationships with British soldiers and officials, constitutional politicians and, most strikingly, with hard-line terrorists. His questions to republican and loyalist killers in Provos and Loyalists were notably terse and direct. Incidentally, to get an insight into the minds of loyalists who undertook, for example, to bomb Dublin in 1974, killing 26 civilians and injuring 140, to shoot innocent Catholics in a bookmaker's shop in Belfast in 1993 or at the Rising Sun bar at Greysteel in 1993, it is necessary to read 'Loyalists'.

In his interviews, Taylor has almost seemed to be providing terrorists with the opportunity to unburden themselves of guilt over the morality of their actions or at least cast doubt on the usefulness of careers spent murdering and maiming. His line of interrogation with covert security force personnel over controversial methods and other matters in Brits is equally incisive. The reader (or viewer) of Taylor's work is never left feeling that there was any chumminess with interviewees which would have compromised the interview. Equally though, there must have been a crucial sense of trust for the questioning to have taken place and gone the way it did. This is what makes Taylor such a productive and interesting journalist and this book the compelling third part of a gripping, if deeply depressing, narrative and analysis of the Northern Irish Troubles.

Stephen Rathbone Head of History

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