Gun Moll Tells All

By Curt Prendergast

TO TAKE ARMS: MY YEAR WITH THE I.R.A. PROVISIONAL

by MARIA McGUIRE

185 pages. Viking. $6.95.

For a time Maria McGuire had romantic notions of Irish Republican Army leaders as "rugged heros." They in turn, she admits, were surprised to find a girl in hot pants who was interested in the Provisional I.R.A.

But Maria, now 25, was more than a guerrilla groupie. University educated, multilingual, pretty, and with plenty of public relations savvy, she was one of the I.R.A.'s better front agents. Then after a year she fell out of love with the Provo leadership and defected to write this kiss-and-tell book about the men who have been blowing Ireland apart.

Dave O'Connell, the Provisional I.R.A.'s political-military swing man, took Maria along as interpreter on an arms-buying trip to Europe. Their mission began as Irish low comedy and ended in fiasco. In Amsterdam their cover was blown, their planeload of Czech bazookas, rocket launchers and hand grenades was impounded, and Maria and Dave lammed out just ahead of the cops. She returned to Dublin a celebrity--too much so for the taste of Sean MacStiofain, the transplanted Englishman who was then the Provisional I.R.A.'s chief of staff. Maria McGuire hated the dour, puritanical MacStiofain (who since has been replaced as the Proves' top military man). His Roman Catholic scruples would not even let him bring back from the Protestant North a box of contraceptives his men needed to make acid fuses for their bombs. In her book, the Provo leader emerges as a ruthless, Machiavellian schemer, hooked on violence and callous about casualties. "What does it matter if Protestants get killed? They're all just bigots, aren't they?" she quotes MacStiofain as saying after a car bomb had killed several passersby.

Growing disenchanted with the bloodshed, Maria left last year after the Proves' short-lived truce with the British army broke down and the I.R.A. went back on the offensive. On Friday, July 21, 1972--forevermore "Bloody Friday" on the Belfast calendar--the city was hit by 20 bombs in a single hour.

Eleven people were killed, more than a hundred injured. "Now, almost for the first time, I wondered about the crippled and the widowed and the lives that had been changed forever." She called a British journalist and fled with him to London, dumping into an airport trash can the Walther 7.65 automatic she had stuck in her purse for protection.

"I know many members of the Provisional movement consider me a traitor. But for me the ultimate betrayal would be silence," she writes, insisting that her quarrel with the Proves is over their method, not their aim of driving the British out of Ireland. Nonetheless, Maria's defection and the vindictive wrath of the I.R.A. have effectively deprived her of the chance of living safely in her OWn Country. "Curt Prendergast

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