The IRA and Its Shadow War, in the Crosshairs

IN IMAGES

Games of surveillance, false names and purloined documents make up the substance of a new book by Irish photographer Martin Cregg, titled The Plot.

By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Martin Cregg.

Photographer and educator, Martin Cregg coordinates the photography department at Pearse College of Further Education, in Dublin. With The Plot, he undertakes an artistic enquiry into the clandestine intelligence war waged between the IRA and British agents during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), within a “capital transformed into a theatre of espionage.”

Composed as a dialogue between contemporary photographs, historical documents and archival material, the book weaves the complex narrative of an Irish republican resistance determined to eliminate members of the Crown forces stationed in Dublin and to overthrow British occupation of Ireland.

Cregg’s research led him to photograph sites once devoted to military training, clandestine munitions factories and republican safe houses. Many of these locations were also the scenes of assassinations and failed ambush attempts. “The common street concealed the secret architecture of combat.”

This intelligence war was directed at the time by Michael Collins from a clandestine headquarters set up above a print shop on Crow Street, a stone’s throw from Dublin Castle. Ormonde Winter oversaw the “I Division” within the Castle, while David Neligan, an IRA mole, moved through its very heart. The organisation had its own squad of assassins, The Squad, within which “each man combined surveillance with lethal intent.”

Conceived as an object-book, in the image of the archives it summons, The Plot must first be “opened up.” Its sealed jacket veils its contents until the reader, blade in hand, slits open the front flap of the volume, following the dotted line provided for that purpose. Once “unsealed,” like a classified file, the volume reveals the weighty secrets that haunt its author’s inquiry, certain to captivate historians and enthusiasts of clandestine plots alike.

The Plot, by Martin Cregg, is published by Kehrer Verlag. Texts by Martin Cregg. Hardcover with open thread stitching and banderole. 288 pages. €48.