Operation Chiffon, by Peter Taylor

Posted on July 23, 2026 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: An indispensable channel, but not the Peace Process

Operation Chiffon is Peter Taylor’s account of the “Back Channel”: the secret line of communication maintained intermittently between the British government and the IRA from the 1970s into the Peace Process.

Taylor focuses particularly on the MI6 officer Michael Oatley, his MI5 successor, known only as Robert, and their principal intermediary, Brendan Duddy, a Derry businessman.

It is an engaging story, worth telling not least to honour the courage and persistence of those who kept open the possibility of dialogue while the conflict continued. Uncovering its details has been a journalistic project of several decades for Taylor, and he tells the clandestine story extremely well.

Perhaps because he has invested so much in uncovering it, however, Taylor also invests too much historical importance in it. In his telling, the Back Channel becomes not merely one important element of the Peace Process but its decisive mechanism. Indeed, he endorses the contention that without it there would have been no Peace Process.

The wider political architecture receives remarkably little attention. Hume’s three-stranded approach to a settlement, the New Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Hume–Adams and the Downing Street Declaration are either treated briefly or relegated to the margins. The constitutional significance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement—giving the Irish government an institutional role in the affairs of a territory claimed as an integral part of the United Kingdom—is scarcely explored. Hume–Adams is also downplayed, on the highly dubious grounds that Martin McGuinness was more central than Gerry Adams to the republican movement’s strategic leadership: McGuinness was the Back Channel’s principal IRA interlocutor.

This mistakes access for authorship. The fact that McGuinness managed a crucial line of communication does not establish that the line itself generated the republican strategy or the political settlement. The Back Channel could communicate intentions, test propositions and build confidence. It could not, by itself, create the political circumstances in which an IRA ceasefire became possible.

Taylor gives particular weight to Robert’s assurance to McGuinness that the eventual outcome of the conflict would be Irish unity. Robert confirms that he expressed this view, apparently going beyond his instructions. Taylor presents the exchange as a decisive moment.

It may certainly have mattered. Coming from someone understood to represent the British government, it could reassure the republican leadership that Britain would not permanently obstruct constitutional change if consent for unity could eventually be secured. But that is different from supposing that Robert’s personal prediction transformed republican strategy. It is more plausible that his words corroborated conclusions already emerging from electoral experience, Hume–Adams, contacts with Dublin and the developing relationship between the British and Irish governments.

Seen within the totality of relationships that produced the Peace Process, corroboration appears to have been the Back Channel’s principal function. The British wanted to establish whether Irish government and SDLP assurances—that an inclusive political process could draw republicans away from violence—were credible. The IRA, in turn, wanted to know whether the political inclusion and constitutional openness promised by Hume and others would actually be delivered once it ended its campaign.

Republican caution was understandable. The movement had emerged from the 1975 ceasefire convinced that it had been induced to suspend its campaign, weakened in the process and offered no corresponding political advance. Whether or not that had been the British government’s deliberate intention, it became a powerful lesson within republican strategy: a ceasefire without reliable political guarantees could become a trap.

As a mechanism of mutual assurance, therefore, the Back Channel was extremely important. It allowed each side to test the seriousness of the other without public commitment and gave messages an authority that informal political contacts might have lacked.

But a channel is not the same thing as the process whose messages it carries. Without the political framework developed through the work of Hume and many others, there would have been little for Oatley, Robert or Duddy to communicate. Taylor has written a compelling account of one indispensable strand of the Peace Process. His mistake is to treat that strand as the fabric itself.

Light of Copertino

Posted on July 14, 2026 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: a photographic essay on the heat of the day.

Mastering the mind

Posted on July 14, 2026 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: things I’ve learned doing Mastermind.

In the decade or so since I won Mastermind, not one soul entering the quiz has ever asked me for a word of advice on how to do well on it … even feckers I know.

And I have opinions! They may not be plentiful but, in case of use for anyone, here they are.

Do your favorite subject first, because you may never get another chance.
Study your specialist subject like your whole future depends on it. Because in Mastermind terms it does. It is the only subject area where you know the sort of questions that might come up, so you have to endeavor to max this round out.
Questions usually have one or two word answers so try to spot likely candidates as you revise.
If you don’t know the answer immediately, give yourself a moment to think. In my first round I passed on about 4 questions in the general knowledge which I recalled the answer to immediately on saying the word “pass”. I had thought it was better tactics to pass and move on rather than dawdle trying to recall an answer. It’s not. Fortunately I had done enough work on the specialist subject round to carry me through.
Before sitting in the black chair I would have said that winning depended on hard work and luck, and that, in accordance with most things, about any one of 20% of the entrants could win the whole thing. I still think that is more or less right. But as Gary Player, I think, said, the harder you work, the luckier you get.
Winning also depends on staying calm when the chips are down. It takes as much energy to panic as it does to think, so try to think.
And so, as with life, the rules are simple: work hard, hope for some luck, and try to hold your nerve at the moment of truth.
Here endeth the lesson.

PS, from the legend that is Mr Dave McBryan:

4a Even if you know you aren’t going to know the answer to something, a speedy wrong answer is usually a better tactic than a pass.

And one more to add:
Listen. Focus for the entire question. It’s all too easy to zone out at the beginning because you’re still thinking about the previous q, or to to miss something crucial late on because you stopped paying attention once you thought you had the answer. Any thoughts about other qs or how well/badly you’re doing are distractions to be avoided – in the moment, nothing matters except the current q.

When female genital mutilation becomes human trafficking

Posted on June 11, 2026 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: An overlooked category of enslavement.

I caused some surprise recently when, speaking to a group of anti-trafficking professionals, I mentioned that female genital mutilation can be a form of human trafficking. I was somewhat surprised at the surprise so I thought it might be useful to set out the basis for my statement.

First, the definition of human trafficking is set out in various international conventions including the Palermo Protocol and the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings.

But, put most simply, human trafficking may be thought of as the process of rendering a person into a situation of exploitation, that is, at minimum, “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”

The list of exploitative purposes in these instruments should not be read as exhaustive. The language is expressly framed as a minimum. The question, therefore, is not simply whether female genital mutilation is named in the conventions. It is whether, in particular factual circumstances, the acts and means required by the trafficking definition are present, and whether the purpose is one of exploitation. My argument is that, in many cases, FGM does meet that test.

Many forms of female genital mutilation involve the partial or total removal of the clitoral glans – the external and visible part of the clitoris, which is itself a larger organ extending internally. So, when a child has been recruited, transported, transferred, harboured or received for that purpose, then the Convention elements of child trafficking may be satisfied.

Where those same trafficking acts are carried out in relation to adult women, and where FGM is imposed by trafficking “means” such as force, coercion, deception, abuse of power, abuse of vulnerability, or payments to a person exercising control over them, then the Convention elements of trafficking may also be satisfied.

The absence of FGM from the usual examples of trafficking should not be mistaken for its incompatibility with the legal concepts of trafficking, slavery or slavery-like practices. And the trafficking argument is only part of the issue. FGM should also be understood as a slavery-like practice of coercive sexual control.

The 1926 Slavery Convention defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”

The World Health Organization notes that “FGM is often considered a necessary part of raising a girl, and a way to prepare her for adulthood and marriage. This can include controlling her sexuality to promote premarital virginity and marital fidelity.”

Where individuals or groups within a community claim the power to impose permanent control over such a fundamental aspect of a girl’s or woman’s humanity as her sexuality, they are, in effect, exercising powers attaching to the right of ownership. Put bluntly, this is the sort of power human beings more commonly claim over livestock: the power to alter bodies, control sexuality and regulate reproductive capacity in the interests of those claiming ownership-like powers over another body.

Hence female genital mutilation is not simply a harmful traditional practice or an assault on bodily integrity. It is a coercive process by which adults exercise permanent control over a girl’s sexuality, marriageability and social status. At minimum, the omission of FGM from the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery – produced by the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration, and focused on forced labour and forced marriage – exposes a serious gap in how ownership-like control over women and girls is counted.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple

Posted on June 7, 2026 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: Recovering a forgotten Jewish history, vital for our times

At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged both as a response to European antisemitism and, in a fundamental way, as an acceptance of one of antisemitism’s central claims: that Jews could never truly belong in Europe. Its answer was a Jewish “homeland,” ultimately to be established in Palestine, with catastrophic consequences for the people already living there. After the briefly entertained East Africa scheme, the Balfour Declaration gave imperial force to this idea, helping to condemn Palestinians to dispossession in the name of Jewish refuge.

Among the earliest and most strenuous opponents of this idea were European Jews themselves. For example, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s British government, while perhaps not an opponent of colonialism per se, was a fierce opponent of Zionism, viewing it as an antisemitic concept that would jeopardize the status of Jews in Britain.

In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple focuses on a different group of Jewish anti-Zionists: the Bund – the name translates from German or Yiddish as “union” – a Jewish social democratic movement that grew in Eastern Europe, particularly in the old Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The Bund, as Crabapple shows, was fiercely opposed to colonialism and rejected Zionism’s plain implication that Jews should answer European exclusion by displacing others. Instead they insisted that their culture, including the Yiddish language and literature, should be nourished and respected in the countries in which they lived. For decades they organized to achieve this.

There is an echo of Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World in Crabapple’s gripping work. Both books show how a people often treated as peripheral profoundly shaped wider political history.. In the case of the Bund, Crabapple traces their influence from the Russian Revolution, where they allied with the Mensheviks, to resistance against the Nazis alongside the Polish Socialist Party, and finally to the radical Jewish politics of New York City that formed part of the coalition behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty..

Like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, it is also a book that made me rethink large portions of history that I had previously thought myself relatively familiar with. For example, no other history of Eastern Europe that I have read – even Timothy Snyder’s superb Bloodlands – has quite so forensically itemized the scale of antisemitic atrocity that plagued Eastern Europe from the end of the First World War to the destruction of Warsaw.

But, in describing all of this, Crabapple’s purpose is not special pleading to show antisemitic atrocity as something unique. Rather she strives to show, as Seamus Heaney reflected, that all “Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.” And so, Zionism was born as a result of European violence and, as the Jews suffered in Europe, so the Palestinians now continue to suffer at the hands of the state and settlement project that Zionism produced. Palestinian armed groups have also committed atrocities, sometimes with comparable levels of cruelty, though without comparable power. This will inevitably continue until the cycle of violence can be broken.

The Bund sought to break this cycle through solidarity. That they lost, in the face of the monstrousness of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany does not negate their message. As Crabapple writes, “solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us. There is no other earth after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to us all as an inheritance and prison.” The alternative is the morality of the bully with the strong doing what they wish, while the weak endure what they must.

Molly Crabapple’s book is an outstanding work of narrative history, elegantly written, compelling and deeply moving – it made me cry more than once. It is a fierce assertion that another world is possible in which we all try to take care of each other instead of honouring the worst instincts of the cruel and the greedy.

Dances with dolphins

Posted on May 2, 2026 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: Alvor, Portugal

The Shortest History of Ireland, by James Hawes

Posted on April 20, 2026 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: “… in this great future we can’t forget our past, so dry your tears I say…”

Perhaps not quite as arresting as his Shortest History of Germany, but James Hawes Shortest History of Ireland is an exquisite thing.

Rather than allow himself to lose narrative momentum, Hawes does, perhaps, skip over a few historical controversies – notably the impact of the Invincibles’ atrocity on the Kilmainham “Treaty”, and Collins role in the assassination of Henry Wilson. But the overall coherence of that narrative, his rigorous attention to evidence, the entertainment of his storytelling and the elegance of the prose are exceptional.

It is refreshing to see proper attention given to the role of Hume in the peace process. This has become something of a rarity in recent accounts which tend to emphasise the parallel squalid spooky shenanigans that some English writers (yes I do mean Peter Taylor!) like to dubiously assert were central.

This is immediately the best concise history of Ireland available anywhere. So, it is nice that it concludes on a hopeful note albeit one that must be underpinned by caution: Irish reunification is now inevitable.

To grasp the full potential of this demands careful planning, perhaps aiming for a new federal constitution based on the four provinces. The current Dublin-centric model of government hordes power in the very way the English did during their colonial exploitation of the island to the continuing detriment of those living “beyond the Pale.”

So, if this book has a moral it’s that if today’s Irish politicians don’t rapidly reconvene the New Ireland Forum to gather evidence and plan for the future, then they will deserve every iota of historical ignominy that will inevitably be heaped upon them.

Life so far

Posted on April 20, 2026 by aidanjmcquade

On turning 60, I thought I should take stock to ponder if have spent my years usefully.

So what have I actually achieved?

I started my professional career working for a couple of years organising hand dug wells for water, and check dams for soil conservation, in rural Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Then I designed a piped water system for a quarter of a million war-displaced people outside Jalalabad in Afghanistan.
After pushing papers in Oxford for a year or so I led a water, sanitation and public health programme for a quarter of a million war-displaced people in the besieged cities of the Angolan interior for the best part of five years.
During that time I caught a sailfish off the coast of Angola. Tagged and released it.
After Angola I learned to dive.
Then I earned a PhD.
I was appointed director of Anti-Slavery in 2006 and immediately had to organise its financial turnaround.
I successfully advocated for making slavery eradication a post-2015 development goal.
I found a woman who’d put up with me.
I contributed to the introduction of a new statute in British law proscribing forced labour.
I ran a marathon, very slowly.
I helped expose slavery in the manufacture of garments for Western high street brands.
I won Mastermind with the specialist subjects Michael Collins, the novels of Dennis Lehane, and Abraham Lincoln.
I helped develop the jurisprudence around “abuse of a position of vulnerability” as a means of trafficking in the case of Chowdury et al v Greece at the European Court of Human Rights.
I helped obtain inclusion of victim protection and supply chain transparency measures in the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015).
I achieved recognition of forced marriage as slavery in the International Labour Organization’s 2017 estimates of global slavery.
I published my 1st novel – The Undiscovered Country about the investigation of a murder during the Irish war of independence.
I learned how to take a better photograph.
I played a key role in mainstreaming anti-slavery in a major UN migration and livelihoods programme in Myanmar.
I published Ethical Leadership: moral decision-making under pressure
I published my 2nd novel – Some Service to the State about the damage caused by partition on modern Ireland.
I worked out how to end slavery. Wrote it down in a book chapter called “Justice against Power: Marshalling a credible response to slavery eradication.”
I’ve been an expert witness in over 200 trafficking cases.
I began writing a play on the life of Frederick Douglass.
I’ve started writing my fourth book on the Irish peace process… which has given me the idea for another play.