Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about the Irish

Malcolm Gladwell, the curly-haired, counter-intuitive guru of modern thought who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink, certainly has a readable style, and often a striking way of turning received notions on their head. His latest book, David and Goliath — about the inspiring advantages of perceived disadvantage — is accompanied by a much-hyped speaking tour, the blurb for which describes him as a ‘global phenomenon’. In it, among other topics, he plunges into the origin of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but the location wasn’t his first choice. He recently told the Telegraph’s literary editor, Gaby Wood, that he had wanted to write about Israel but chose Northern Ireland instead because it was ‘safer’, as the English had ‘a greater willingness to be self-critical’ (in other words, were less liable to launch an aggressive counter-attack upon Gladwell’s reputation). The sense of safety might be part of the problem: fairly quickly, the Ireland foray slips into terrible complacency.

His account thereafter, as it hits its stride, might lightly embarrass even a diehard Belfast republican in mixed company. In Gladwell’s view, Britain was Goliath — big and strong but poorly sighted — whose failure to win Catholic hearts and minds alone triggered resistance in the shape of David, the Catholics of West Belfast. He makes a simple, oft-repeated equation: that when Britain had a military ‘crackdown’, violence soared. Although heavy on the detail of British actions, he is singularly light on particularising IRA violence (statistics for deaths, shootings and bombings are given in the most coyly generalised terms).

There were indeed many ways in which the British government made an early hash of things. The heavy-handed Lower Falls Curfew in July 1970 — part of a hunt for republican weapons amid a fire-fight with the Official IRA — and the destructive behaviour of some soldiers in working-class Catholic homes lost the Army much support.