The Irish Republican Army's (IRA) drive for Irish independence throughout the twentieth century was frequently fraught with fractures in ideology, strategic visions, and personality-led fissures known as factions. Factions divided the republican movement during the Irish Civil War in the 1920s and the debates about constitutional questions during the 1930s. The national turmoil bubbled over during the institutionalization of the partition of the six counties in the late 1940s, as the southern counties became an independent republic, and in the mid-1950s, when the IRA engaged in a small-scale border campaign in what some have called its “twilight years.” The weight of the partition left an organizational separation between the IRA's Dublin/Cork (South) and Belfast (North) members, and the system of discrimination against Catholics in the North influenced ideological drifts amid the Northern Ireland civil rights movement and contributed to the divisive split of Official IRA and the Provisional IRA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Official IRA further splintered with the offshoot of the Irish National Liberation Army in the mid-1970s, before the Provisionals transformed the movement with a shift toward the hunger strikes and electoral strategies of the 1980s. That strategic shift subsequently produced republican Sinn Fein, and, against the backdrop of the peace process in the 1990s, the Continuity IRA and Real IRA broke away from the Provisional IRA. Evidence of IRA factional activity has persisted during the implementation phase of the Belfast Agreement, centering on issues of decommissioning, decriminalization, and both intersectarian and intrasectarian violence.

Although the IRA has frequently attracted the attention of both academics and journalists, the subject of factionalization and a pattern of that process in the Irish republican movement have not received much attention. Perhaps, this has been due to the timing of the movement's strategic emphases or due to barriers to access to the organization itself. Andrew Sanders's Inside the IRA: Dissident Republicans and the War for Legitimacy provides both a long-term view of the pattern of internal fissures and access to the IRA's own firsthand accounts of events that led to factional splits and organizational offshoots.

In this book, Sanders gives a fresh overview of the historical nature of schisms within the Irish republican movement in the context of the continuity of the militarism dedicated to achieve an independent, free Irish Republic. He begins by offering an introduction to the durability of the republican tradition from 1916 to 1962. Next, Sanders concentrates upon the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s before he delves into the topical issues underpinning the turbulent implementation of the Northern Irish peace process in the twenty-first century.

Drawing upon interviews or correspondence involving thirty primary actors in the key moments of Irish republican history over the course of the past fifty years, Sanders provides insights based upon firsthand accounts of the events, issues, and people of (often) legendary status in and around the IRA during this time. Of particular note are the two chapters dedicated to the influence of American actors in supporting the IRA's integration into the peace process in the 1980s and 1990s. The author's superior access to republicans is complemented by the closely guided work that Sanders engaged in with his Queens University, Belfast thesis professor, Richard English, author of Armed Struggle—The History of the IRA (2003). In addition, providing an outsider view of the IRA from Loyalists, British Special Forces, American activists, and factional IRA members affords a uniquely rich understanding of the IRA's organizational history and splinter groups.

Two persistent flaws, however, undermine Sanders's efforts. First, the author's introductory emphasis on the historical pattern of factionalization does not lead to a solid conclusion regarding the nature of those patterns and their sources or catalysts. Sanders sometimes treats the factions as personality based, but at other times he characterizes them as issue based. He initially suggests that the IRA is institutionally organizationally predisposed to spawn factions, but his final conclusion is allusive. The reader is left to resurrect the book's initial question concerning the origin of such schisms but must remain uncertain about the dominant cause of IRA factionalization. Is the pattern a persistent personality-led process or an endemic, issue-based organizational fracturing? Or does the inconclusive conclusion reflect the lack of any consistent process of causation producing this pattern of factionalization? In addition, Sanders's attempt to capture the importance of the republican tradition in the Irish historical struggle throughout the twentieth century produces a cursory sweep of the first half of the century, blurring significant historical details in an abbreviated account of the IRA's origin and early history. This leaves the reader less equipped to balance the big picture of Irish republican history with the precise detailing of events, and often these precise details are the cataclysmic forces for the dissident factions Andrew Sanders has endeavored to discuss.

In the end, Inside the IRA: Dissident Republicans and the War for Legitimacy challenges Irish historians to seek both an internal analysis and an external observation to frame the pattern of Irish republican factionalization. The challenges, noted above, to Sanders's work are comfortably characteristic of the history that he bravely covers. The sweeping rigor of this book provocatively offers a frank discussion of the controversial concept of republican revisionism that is based upon the author's attentive scholarship.