Jean McConville was a 37-year-old Protestant who had married a Catholic, coverted to Catholicism and moved into the Falls Road. In 1972 she was living in deep poverty in Divis Flats with eight of her ten children. Her husband had died the year before. In December she disappeared. No trace has ever been found. Moloney says she had been a low-level spy for British military intelligence, keeping an eye on the movements of republican neighbors. Her family maintains that her offense was merely to comfort a British soldier wounded by a sniper outside the door of her flat. Whatever. The Belfast Brigade ordered her death, but decided against dumping her body on the street. Publicity about the killing of a widowed mother of ten might have more than offset the value of deterrence. McConville was kidnapped at gunpoint from her home, her children left terrified, bewildered and alone, and taken to a beach near the County Louth border, shot in the head and buried deep in the sand. She had been Disappeared.

In the mid-1990s, as the peace process gathered momentum, McConville's children launched a campaign to recover her body. Bill Clinton gave them public support. The IRA acknowledged for the first time that they'd killed her and promised to help locate her remains. A hugely publicized search over a number of weeks made for a bleak running story in the Irish media, but in the end yielded nothing--except that it had catapulted the issue of the Disappeared back into public consciousness just at the moment when republican leaders were trying to slough off the muck of terrorism and project themselves as pristine peacemongers. Hence the hypersensitivity now, a few years and further steps toward republican merger into the mainstream, to Moloney's claim that Adams, even if he didn't give the direct order to disappear McConville, "must have known all about the circumstances at the time." Hence, more generally, the anger that he has illuminated so brightly areas of republican activity upon which little light has hitherto fallen. Moloney gives us a portrait crowded with vivid detail where previously we had a rough sketch daubed in darkness.

The detail is sometimes daunting. Like any clandestine armed organization hemmed in by high-tech surveillance and surrounded by psy-ops, the IRA has worked in a world of subterfuge, double-bluff and necessary paranoia. In a series of meticulously reconstructed accounts, Moloney suggests that virtually every major operational catastrophe--the 1987 capture by French customs officials of the steamer Eksund, which was bringing in 150 tons of arms from Libya; the entrapment and slaughter of frontline Tyrone units in the 1980s by a combination of the British Special Air Service and the loyalist Royal Ulster Constabulary; the sometimes lethal unreliability of weapons--can be put down to betrayal at a high level. Each incident, he implies, boosted the covert strategy of Adams and his close associates. Perhaps.

Moloney's narrative makes no room for romance. There is no sense here that to die by gunshot might be the finest play under the sun. Nobody is presented lightheartedly carrying his or her cross for Ireland. The dominant tone is of anger and pity at cruelty and loss. The unsettling question the portrait poses for republicans is whether the Good Friday Agreement--which, whatever it might augur for the unpredictable future, leaves Northern Ireland constitutionally within the United Kingdom--represents an adequate return on the IRA's investment of pain, inflicted and endured. In an interview with the Boston reporter Jim Dee some years ago, John Hume, leader of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), mused that the crunch for republicans would come when a deal was put before them "and somebody stands up at the back and asks, 'What did Jimmy die for, then?'" Hunger-striker Bobby Sands's sister, Bernadette, says, "My brother didn't die for cross-border bodies."

What the IRA has killed and died for is the Republic. To most outsiders, including outsiders in Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement seems a major step toward this objective--a guaranteed share of power in regional government plus all-Ireland bodies with, arguably, the potential to evolve into institutions wielding executive authority across the island. This, in essence, is the Adams analysis of what was achievable, which Moloney suggests he had arrived at and resolved to settle for much earlier than anyone, including his fellow republican leaders, realized.

The agreement doesn't represent freedom, then, but freedom to achieve freedom. Not the promised land, but a stepping stone toward it. The problem is that the IRA has differed from movements that republicans have sometimes, depending on who's within earshot, been content to compare themselves with--the Basque ETA, the African National Congress, the Palestine Liberation Organization--in that it has seen the Republic not as an aspiration but as an actually existing entity. The ideological basis for this has to do with the proclamation of the Republic on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin at Easter 1916 and its endorsement in the 1918 general election--the last all-Ireland poll before partition. The seventy-three Sinn Fein MPs elected then, out of 105 Irish seats, constituted the first and only legitimate parliament--the First Dail--in Ireland. The 1919-21 War of Independence was fought in defense of the Republic and to assert the legitimacy of that Dail. As successive leaderships--Michael Collins, Eamon De Valera, etc.--abandoned the rocky road of armed struggle for the primrose path of compromise politics and partition of the country, the IRA Army Council became the repository of the 1916 tradition and thereby the only legitimate political authority in the land. In this perspective, any deal that falls short of the Republic cannot be a step forward but has to be seen as an abandonment of position, a shaming retreat. The most hallowed figure in the republican pantheon, Patrick Pearse, the leader of the '16 Rising, decreed that a man who accepts "anything less by one iota than separation from England is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation...that it would be better for that man (as it were certainly better for his country) that he had not been born."

This idea of the IRA leadership as the only source of political legitimacy may seem fanciful, mystical, ridiculous. But it has been this conception of its role and historical significance that has sustained the IRA through lean years when it could find little sustenance in the day-to-day world around it. Just as important, it's this view of the Republic that has provided moral sanction for armed struggle. To end the armed struggle now definitively, to contemplate disbandment of the IRA, as Tony Blair, special US envoy Richard Haass and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern are currently urging on Adams, would be retrospectively to withdraw sanction from those who carried on the struggle at times of fierce condemnation from all except themselves alone. Only the shining reality of the Republic can reflect light on the armed struggle in such a way as to invest it with due grandeur, render even the killing of Jean McConville tolerable, just.

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