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Both the public and the academic response to terrorism has been ahistorical, exaggerated, and closely associated with congenial political postures; moreover, the academic perspective is conditioned by the nature of individual philosophy. The books under review examine the subject from several points of view, in which the conventional means of social scientists have been wielded to mixed advantage. Since there are no agreed definitions, no accepted limits to the subject, and no very effective academic approach, the situation seems unlikely to improve dramatically in the near future.

Remorselessly, and apparently inevitably, as 1976 ticks away, the death toll in the tangled Irish Troubles creeps higher, faster this year than any time since 1972—the vintage year for blood and turmoil. Except for the threatened, no one any longer seems greatly to care. Murder must be peculiarly grisly or quite spectacular to warrant more than cursory coverage in any but Irish journals. The dramatic detonation of a mine under the British ambassador's Jaguar outside Dublin in July engendered, briefly, media interest. Ambassadors are not assassinated every day, but in Ulster ordinary people are—or nearly every day. There have been too many nowarning bombs in pubs to remember, too many sprawled bodies discovered by pedestrians to concern any but the devastated relatives. The Provisional IRA's self-imposed truce has eroded and again there are bombs in Belfast, land mines in South Armagh, snipers in Derry. The British army and especially the Ulster police have become prime targets. Yet the Republicans feud among themselves. The Loyalist paramilitaries still pursue a strategy of random assassination and thus have unleashed a vicious, seemingly irreversible, cycle of tit-for-tat murders. Politicians, warders, judges are targets of assassins of various faiths. And the violence has been exported. There are bombs in Manchester and Birmingham, assassins in Kensington and gunmen firing into restaurants in London's West End, explosions in the underground, firebombs in the shops. The Loyalist paramilitaries have carried their war into the Irish Republic with explosions in crowded streets. The elegant Gresham and Shelbourne hotels have been bombed in Dublin and lesser resort establishments hit elsewhere. The greatest single slaughter, twenty-six people killed, came in a Dublin street, not in Belfast or Derry. No one sees an end. Even the hope that mutual exhaustion might bring an end to violence has flickered out.

As the years pass, the Northern Ireland Troubles appear to have become institutionalized at an intolerable but apparently irreducible level of violence. There appears no light at the end of the tunnel, and no firm evidence that the center can hold. The bridges between a divided society have long been reduced to rubble. The Provisional IRA appears capable, even eager, to continue a campaign of guerrilla attrition damned as self-defeating, immoral, and bloody-minded by all concerned including the Official IRA. In return Protestant gunmen have opened the season on Catholics, all guilty of treason in some form, all enemies of British Ulster. And the British Army remains a tempting target even at times to the Protestant militants.

Perhaps the only undeniable blessing to evolve from the recent troubles in Northern Ireland has been miniboom in the publishing industry. Seldom have so many, written so quickly, on a subject understood by so few—and turning, one assumes, a decent profit for their effort. Traditionally contemporary modern Ireland has attracted the occasional coffee-table volume or the nearly annual The Irish, potted "sociology." Until quite recently, few scholars have ventured into contemporary affairs—those events after the revolutionary years of 1916–1921—and almost none of the tools of social science have been put to use on Irish society. Thus the latest commentators found a truly virgin field, bereft of valid experts, congenial to anecdote, fashionably violent, amusingly Irish and if not fit for the coffee table certainly attractive in the market-place. The result has been a twofold outpouring: first of those who would chronicle in print what had been for the British audience nightly fare on the television and second of those more committed or more daring who would interpret, analyze, explain and predict. The former, however ill-prepared, sought to write history, however superficially, while the latter sought to make it by rearranging the past to buttress their vision of the future. Neither the observers nor the participants have in print as yet produced a single definitive work nor in fact a very satisfactory plain tale of events—much less a revelation into the nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The attempts of this first wave to date, however, offer some insights into the Northern Ireland problem, into the nature of Irish and British scholarship and, perhaps, into the future that awaits the most distressful Six-counties.