|
|
|||
|
Issue No.16 Spring 2004
That Rowan, a long time security
correspondent with the BBC, has sat down to put together a book that covers
the post-1994 years is a credit to him. One either needs to be brain dead
and thus immune to the tedium of the peace process, or possessed of a
commitment to their line of work, which would allow some deep digging
into the reserves of motivation, that otherwise remain beyond the ability
of those equipped with more mortal constitutions. Rowan’s commitment
places him in the motivational category. How he has held his sanity after
years of listening to the garbage bins that pass as politicians and players,
while they spew out their endless rubbish, beggars belief. In the peace
process where the same lies are told with tautological monotony, where
one event slips into another, and one year’s speech seems the same
as any other; where endless talk of the greatest crisis ever, or the most
important summit yet, or the most serious election witnessed in the history
of the British Isles, erodes the grey cells which sustain our interest,
Rowan has survived and has managed to leave us something that will be
flicked through by students of the conflict for years to come as they
seek to ground events. Unfortunately, as Rowan by dint
of his job title is expected to have access to the type of sources and
contacts that most researchers would give their eye tooth for, he seems
not to have produced the big aces that readers would hope for. On the
contrary, the book comes in the form of one long rally after another,
with little to puncture the predictability of serve, return, return again
ad infinitum. If you report what the political equivalent of boring Belgium
businessmen tell you, your report is hardly going to scale the dizzying
heights of titillation. In many ways, this is a book
that Sinn Fein more than most will be happy with. Perhaps this is why
so many turned up for the launch. And it is not as if they can be found
rushing off to greet every book that examines their party. They were all
conspicuously absent from the launch of Ed Moloney’s book on Gerry
Adams' management of the IRA. The give away that the author of The Armed Peace had succumbed to the charms of Sinn Fein, which he clearly regards as an establishment party, comes when the reader contrasts his approach to the loyalists with that of republicans. Rowan simply accuses the UDA of lying when it said it had ordered the Red Hand Defenders to stand down: ‘this was nonsense: the UDA was the Red Hand Defenders.’ But nothing so direct when it comes to putting names and faces on the IRA army council. Yet the security correspondent for the BBC knows better. And if he doesn’t he should join the sports team.
|
|||
|
|
|||