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9780228011989

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Probably the bravest, most controversial and groundbreaking book on Northern Ireland since Conor Cruise O'Brien's States of Ireland (1972), this enthralling whodunit is the product of a lifetime's reading, thinking, and passionate activism on behalf of the victims of governments, terrorists, fellow travellers, and other vested interests. Ruth Dudley Edwards, author of The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic Part moving memoir and part engage history. Savage indignation? Definitely. Irony and humour? Indeed. Neutral, dispassionate, detached? Hardly. Stimulating? Throughout. Convincing? Let the readers decide. Who Was Responsible? is a must-read for friend and foe. Cormac O Grada, author of Famine: A Short History A provocative, original, and courageous book. Anybody interested in the Northern Ireland Troubles, or in the complex legacies of terrorist violence, should read it. Richard English, author of Does Terrorism Work? A History This book should be read by every impressionable person who dons the green-tinted spectacles from the comfort of their armchair, or those who ignore the factual among the fictional narrative that war came to the IRA. ... It is an important addition to offer a different analysis of the rise of republican romanticism. Kennedy's exploration of brutal violence inflicted, and the scale of deaths, deconstructs that logic meticulously. The Sunday Independent A work of exceptional frankness ... Kennedy lays out the nature and scale of brutality involved in the Troubles, overseen by a 'black' criminal justice system which was responsible for administering and unspeakable regime of terror on both sides of the secretarian divide. The Commonwealth Lawyer Liam Kennedy's Who Was Responsible for the Troubles? is one of my three final choices disproving the cliche that books on Northern Ireland are boring. Kennedy's gripping survey has all the dash of the hurlers its Tipperary-born author so admires. Naturally, the man who coined the acronym MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever) conducts his field court martial of the chief culprits with a sharp eye. As an historian, he is ferociously fair, but, while he gives a clean bill of health to no side in Northern Ireland, on balance, he believes the Provisional IRA was mostly to blame for the long misery of the armed struggle. Eoghan Harris, Irish Sunday Independent

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Liam Kennedy is emeritus professor of history, Queen's University Belfast, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

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