The Yank

May 23, 2022
Crawley delivers a full-throated and unrepentant call for a united Ireland in this lucid chronicle of his service in the IRA. Born in 1957 to Irish immigrants in Long Island, N.Y., Crawley moved to Ireland at age 14 and, galvanized by the IRA’s opposition to British rule in Northern Ireland, made it his goal to join the group. He took an unusual path to membership, heading back to the U.S. to become a member of the U.S. Marines’ elite Recon unit before returning to Ireland in 1979 to fight for “Irish freedom.” As an IRA member, Crawley was involved in raising funds and getting access to firearms; the latter assignment brought him into contact with notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger. Crawley also plotted major attacks on the English, including one on the London electrical grid in the 1990s that led to his second stint in prison. While it’s difficult not to be swept up in the titillating details, readers may struggle to fully appreciate Crawley’s story, knowing that his actions contributed to the loss of hundreds of innocent lives—a fact that he addresses almost as an afterthought: “Civilians would unintentionally be killed. As inexcusable as that is, it was never deliberate.” Still, this is a clear-eyed look, from the inside, at a group willing to risk it all for a cause.

July 1, 2022

Crawley, an Irish insurrectionist and strident advocate for a united Ireland, details his experience as an Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrilla fighter and critic, convicted gun runner and bombing plotter, and a forceful champion for a united Irish republic--one without the United Kingdom. Born an American, he spent much of his youth living in Ireland. At 18, he joined the U.S. Marines to learn military skills, which he used as an IRA volunteer against the British in Northern Ireland. Soon, he became quite disillusioned with the IRA's training, leadership, planning, and internal security. The IRA sent him to the U.S. to buy arms and work with Whitey Bulger, the notorious organized crime boss. Crawley went to prison for smuggling those arms. In fact, he ended up in prison twice. He remains an outspoken advocate of uniting Ireland and removing all British interference in Irish affairs. VERDICT Readers interested in a firsthand account from an IRA fighter with a U.S. Marine perspective, one who is a forceful believer in Irish republicanism, will find this book very interesting. His experiences and views raise interesting questions about how someone can be a patriot and freedom fighter from one perspective and a terrorist from another.--Mark Jones

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2022
A foot soldier in the Irish Republican Army delivers an unrepentant memoir. While some of Crawley's targets over the years were what he regards as the illegal military occupants of Northern Ireland, others were anyone who happened to be walking down a London street during the IRA's bombing campaigns of the 1980s. His memoir begins with training as a U.S. Marine, for Crawley, an American, moved to Dublin as a teenager and moved back and forth between the two countries, leading a drill instructor to ask, "Ireland! What part of Russia is that in?" His education in Ireland included learning about the republican cause and the conviction that the island, with the northern counties ruled by Britain, needed to be unified to put an end to the "political culture of colonial squatters with its simmering supremacist, sectarian, and siege mentalities." Thus, he recounts, he joined the IRA and conducted nefarious business on its behalf--spending much time, for instance, in the presence of the gangster Whitey Bulger in Boston acquiring gear with which to commit further murders back home. Fortunately for his would-be victims among the Protestant police and British army, Crawley was captured before he could deliver these weapons to the front. For his participation in the chaotic events of the Troubles, he served 14 years in prison, freed under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement between Ireland and Britain--a truce that, he makes clear, he'd be more than willing to violate even today. Much of the text is well-rehearsed propaganda best countered by a salutary reading of Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing. Still, it's useful to have an in-the-trenches story of life as an ordinary soldier in a complicated set of circumstances. For those who grow misty at hearing "The Foggy Dew." Others may tire of Crawley's intransigence.

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