We all know there's no such thing as an agreed history.

The multiple narratives that exist for any one period on this island in the last 50 years prove that.

What aboutery is a concept we're very familiar with in this part of the world.

So what are we to make of the former Conservative Defence Secretary Michael Portillo

continuing his interest in Irish revolutionary political Political History. His two-part documentary

for RTE, Hawks and Doves, looks at the British response in Ireland's War of Independence a century ago.

Michael, welcome to Red Lines. Thank you very much, Mark. You're very upfront about where you're

coming from in these two programs. You say you wear

yourself a hawk when it came to dealing with the IRA back in the 1980s, but then you changed tack.

And you don't hold back in terms of setting out all the failures of the hawks in the British government

a hundred years ago. Yeah, so first of all, my own position was that I was friendly with Air and Eve.

I had traveled in the car in which he was assassinated. I remember that day very well.

I came into Parliament myself because my predecessor, Tony Berry, was killed in the Brighton bombing.

And sometime after that, a very good friend of mine, Ian Gow, was also murdered by the IRA.

So all of those were members of Parliament.

And when I became a minister, I was in the Thacher government,

and of course the Thetra government approach to the IRA and Sinn Féin was pretty hawkish.

I've been investigating the British government's response to the War of

Independence between 1919 and 1921. That's a relatively brief period, but again, you see a very

distinct movement from a hawkish position at the beginning, which really means that they regard the

outbreak of violence as basically

criminal, something that should be and can be controlled by the police and maybe increasingly

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