Policing Ireland's Twisted History

Ireland has long been a country of conflict. More than 400 years ago, the occupying English “planted” pre-Celtic Scots in the northern province of Ulster and divested the native Irish Celts of the land their ancestors owned for 2,000 years. This created a deep-seated enmity between the English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic—and it finally exploded in the Troubles.

Author Alan M. Wilson was on the front lines for the bloodbath that tore Northern Ireland apart from the late 1960s through ...