Killing Rage

"A horrible first-hand account of IRA killing by one of the killers, Eamon Collins, who fell in with the IRA at an early age and soon found himself drawn into the cycle of shooting and bombing. Later he turned against his former comrades and fled. Returning years later he wrote this sinister, troubling account, its impartiality clearly compromised. Having said that, his account has a credibility in its uncomplicated rawness. One of the most poignant passages for me is when Collins describes washing and shaving and playing with his baby son. He then put him in his cot and watched him lying asleep, hoping the little child would never have to do what he was doing. Then he turned on the radio and waited for the news. He has helped deliver a bomb and he knows ‘the boys’ would now be moving it into position. I was appalled. These men were daddies one moment and the next they were prepared to blow to bits other people’s kids. I needed to try and understand where Thomas McMahon had been coming from. He had had young kids of his own when he planted his bomb on Shadow Five. I never approached him, but here was the author of Killing Rage , from the same generation, who was able to write about where the anger and the hatred came from, and how he saw what he was doing was a way of articulating this hatred that had built up over generations. His account was somewhat polished of course, and romanticised, but for all that it was captivating. He wrote in a way that struck a deep chord with me, describing ghostly places in Ireland which in previous times had been bustling neighbourhoods. I knew such places. The areas had been largely depopulated over time, as the local citizenry went away to fill the factories, servants halls and construction sites of the industrialised nations, leaving behind a wound felt by oncoming generations. Collins claimed that he felt he and his cohort were giving vent to the fury felt by the silenced generations, and that they had come to exact a fearful price for a society built on injustice. Although cautious about Collins’s rhetoric, I was fascinated to read how he viewed himself and learn how he was able to live with himself. He finished his book with the hope that the things he described may be forgotten if not forgiven. The IRA evidently took a dim view of this. When he was later found murdered, Irish police were in no doubt they were responsible."