Rory Carroll

Reading Killing Thatcher brought home to me just how much has changed on this island in the quarter century since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, and also just how determined the Brits were to fuck it all up again by voting for Brexit. Cheery!

Anyway, Rory Carroll here produces a fairly tightly focused, journalistic account of the notorious Brighton Bombing in 1984 and the lead-up to it. If Margaret Thatcher—then Tory PM of the U.K., and like her contemporary Ronald Reagan the show more architect of an awful lot of modern economic and social suffering—had spent a minute or two longer in the bathroom of her hotel suite, she would have been more directly caught in the blast and might well have been killed. Carroll mostly eschews the "what ifs" of the scenario, and only occasionally speculates about the things that are still unknown. (How much did Gerry Adams know in advance, and how much did he greenlight.) He focuses instead on the players involved, the event itself, and the investigative aftermath. Carroll is at his best in describing the brutal horror of the explosion and the destruction it wrought. show less

Another entry in my “trying to understand Trump” reading. Chávez comes off as a brilliant clown with an actual interest in ideology, and not just in comparison to Trump—he’s an actual reader, or was at the beginning, and went to jail briefly in service of his beliefs. In power, he acted arbitrarily because arbitrariness helped him be the only source of authority; he’d order a row of stores expropriated on national TV just to show off. Doing that on TV made his rule look show more transparent, too. But what the TV didn’t show was the weeks of government officials sniffing around the stores, asking questions and taking pictures, or the way that store owners snuck into their stores after the cameras left to remove everything of value, or the way that a year later the expropriated stores were boarded up, “the architectural and historic projects [promised by Chávez] yet to begin, possibly forgotten.” He dominated the media, taking up everyone’s thoughts, making people feel nervous if they were away from the news because of what might’ve happened in the interim.

Chávez used oil wealth to buy loyalty with large groups benefited with health care and other subsidies—electricity, phones, cars, houses; even when the health clinics faltered (especially after groups of Cuban doctors stopped becoming available), there were few alternatives. Gas subsidies were such that in 2011 a person could fill an SUV’s tank for under a dollar. Chávez also pushed through a law that was used to bankrupt human rights watchdogs, prison welfare groups, and other anti-government irritants. Crime exploded; police killed between 500-1000 people a year; the prisons were hellholes; Chávez avoided blame for the gangs and the rampant kidnappings and murders by simply not talking about it at all, letting Venezuelans blame local authorities. At the same time, education subsidies let people go to college who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get any education at all. Rolling electricity blackouts in 2010 required Chávez to decide between the subsidies that kept him popular or the industrial heartland of Ciudad Guayana that made aluminum; this was no choice at all. Because Chávez shut it down the smelters so fast, entire plants were ruined. Unmaintained roads fell apart. Chávez seized and redistributed a million hectares of privately owned land to cooperatives, 90% of which failed, in part because there were no financial controls and people could just abscond with money, in part because there was no training or infrastructure. Chávez did another round of expropriation, which scared private farmers who stopped investing. Coops didn’t fill the gap, and so food imports increased. The “oil curse” thus helped destroy Venezuelan agriculture.

Still, the oil money flowed. Chávez promised homes for everyone, and millions registered for the homes, giving them a perceived stake in the continuation of the regime—and creating a valuable electoral database for Chávez.

The powerful hatred felt by elites for him spurred an equal and opposite love in the poor (also with an element of racial antagonism, since Chávez was embraced by groups who tended to be darker-skinned than the elites, and refreshingly when he took over the TV stations Venezuelans finally saw more of themselves both as reporters and reported-on). He was obsessed with surveillance, constantly monitoring both enemies and allies and strategically releasing information to discredit either as needed; the result among politicians and government officials was widespread (justified) paranoia about being monitored. Because of how personalized Chávez made politics, influence and corruption ruled. Officials high and low were terrified to resist because he could destroy their reputations, or at least take their jobs, and they needed to eat and they needed to think they were doing some good, so they just kept going, doing the daily work that kept protest atomized and the regime in power. Repression involved very little in the way of direct physical coercion, just “threats, fines, and jail terms.” Mostly, the book concludes, Chávez’s story is a story of waste—wasted potential, wasted resources. So, you know, parallels and not. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/killing-thatcher-the-ira-the-manhunt-and-the-lon...

In September 1996, I attended the Liberal Democrats’ party conference in Brighton, wearing several hats – I was the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland’s Party Organiser and an aide to their delegation in the talks which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement, but I was also the Chair of the vestigial group of Liberal Democrat party members in Northern Ireland. An earnest BBC radio reporter sat me down for show more an interview in the Grand Hotel at breakfast time. “The situation in Northern Ireland is rather a distant concern for us here at this conference, isn’t it?” she asked me.

I looked back at her. “This building, where we are sitting right now, was blown up by the IRA twelve years ago.”

In this book Rory Carroll goes in depth into one of the IRA’s most audacious operations, the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in September 1984. She narrowly escaped; five party activists were killed; others suffered life-changing injuries. I vividly remember the coverage of Thatcher’s lieutenant Norman Tebbit being dug out of the rubble.

The book goes into intense detail of how the Brighton bomb, and the bomber Patrick Magee, fitted into the IRA’s overall strategy. The leadership were not immediately convinced of the return on investment of such a high risk act, in the wake of the Mountbatten murder. But in the end they were persuaded and the plot went ahead, with Magee planting the bomb with a slow but precise timer weeks in advance.

Magee himself was one of the IRA’s top bomb-makers, but had a complex personal life. I was interested that at one point, while on the run, he found accommodation and work at Venray in the Netherlands, which is where my cousin Gerard Ryan died and is buried. Carroll also gives vivid details of the police side of the story; the forensic investigation of the fragments of the bomb, the identification of Magee’s handprint from his hotel registration, the mixture of chance and preparation leading to his finally being arrested in Scotland in June 1985, while planning more action with a team including Martina Anderson, who I got to know decades later when she was a Member of the European Parliament.

Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, are big and important events, and Rory Carroll’s book gives answers to a lot of the questions that I suppose I had been vaguely wondering about since 1984. It has a couple of minor flaws – the opening chapters jump around the timeline in a way that could be confusing to readers less familiar with the history, and there are a couple of weird repetitions of detail between early and later chapters. So I rank it just below From A Clear Blue Sky (about the Mountbatten bomb) and Say Nothing (about the Price sisters and Jean McConville). But overall it’s a fascinating read about the biggest political bombing in British history. (The Gunpowder Plot doesn’t count, because it was thwarted.) show less

'There Will Be Fire' by Rory Carroll is a tremendous look at a particular IRA bombing which came within mere feet of likely killing British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the 'Iron Lady'. The book has many strengths, including providing an overview of 'The Troubles' during which this bombing took place, but not so detailed an overview as to detract from the focus of the story.

I particularly enjoyed the immediate lead-up to the bomb actually detonating. Rory builds up palpable tension, show more and I could feel my own heart rate and anxiety climbing as the seconds ticked down to detonation. That's exactly the kind of engrossing writing style you want to use with an event as (almost) historically significant as this, and Rory does a tremendous job bringing it to life.

It's clear a large amount of research went into this - the book is sprinkled with references, both explicit and implied, to a variety of autobiographies, biographies, interviews, criminal records, and much more.

I plan on reading Patrick Radden Keefe's 'Say Nothing' next to align with this book; if the reviews for that book are as spot-on as this one, I believe one could make an argument that both books should be considered definitive texts on The Troubles. show less