ABSTRACT
For the most part, summer 1976 in Ireland has been a season of mists and soft skies, the green countryside dotted with tinkers and ruins. The war in the countryside and in the ghettos of Belfast and Derry is only one aspect of the Irish Troubles. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) struggling in Ulster during a campaign of attrition took the war to England or, in some cases, Irishmen fought it there for them. During 1982 the IRA appeared to maintain the momentum in what in 1977 the Army Council decided would be a long war of attrition. The existing Army Council and all IRA policies are dominated by men from the North, especially but not entirely Belfast, who came into the movement in 1969-71. Perhaps congenial and reflective in conversation, they are hard men possessed of deep and narrow ideas, radical in spirit, intolerant of compromise, often uncertain in "political" matters, but absolutely determined.
