The IRA: The Irish Republican Army

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Authored by an individual with 30 years of experience studying terrorism as well as access to the most senior counter-terrorist army and police officers combating the IRA, this book provides the first complete analysis of the world's premier terrorist group to explain them in ideological as well as operational terms. The IRA: The Irish Republican Army begins by examining the historical background to the development of the IRA, the group's basic ideology, and its aims and objectives. The second part of the book concentrates on the IRAspecifically the Provisional IRAas a contemporary phenomenon, explaining its organization, how it operates, who joins the IRA, and why. The book explores how the IRA was formed from a Romantic reaction against modernity, and is an expression of a vehement rejection of the liberal, individualist, and scientific values of the Enlightenment. The IRA's attachment to violence almost as an end in itself, its conflation of Catholicism with Irish-ness, its rejection of big-business for peasant-proprietor economics, and its disregard for individual rights in pursuit of group rights is explained in terms of the groups' scholastic Catholicism foundation. For academic audiences in Irish studies, politics, sociology, history, and security and defense studies, as well as professional security forces and interested general readers with an interest in current affairs, this book supplies a wholly new perspective on both the IRA and terrorism in general.

Reviews

A comprehensive and authoritative examination of the IRA's ideological and organizational origins. . . . The author . . . is a veteran analyst on terrorism and counterterrorism in Northern Ireland. * Perspectives on Terrorism *
What Dingley seeks to offer is an explanation of the movement, specifically the socio-political and philosophical basis from which it arose . . . [the book] provides the reader with a very strong contextual foundation. . . . Such is the detail contained within these chapters that one is left feeling far more informed about the operational workings of the PIRA almost to the point of suspicion! * National Identities *
James Dingley's . . . The IRA . . . should be of value to anyone interested in . . . Durkheimian analysis to modern social issues . . . anyone willing to study the Isle of Ireland as well as terrorism and violence in general. . . . Dingley's work has accompanied me in my field-work encounters all around Northern Ireland's conflictual loci and above all its ethno-religious enclaves. * Dada Rivista di Antropologia Posdt-Globale *

Author Bio

James Dingley, PhD, is visiting research fellow at Queen's University, Belfast, UK; and chairman of the Francis Hutcheson Institute, Belfast, UK.