This Collins is not the film nice guy

The Squad, by T Ryle Dwyer, Mercier Press, €13.

As gardai try to control the activities of criminal gunmen in Dublin and shootings are reported almost daily, it may be a little easier now to imagine what the city was like in the violent period dealt with in Ryle Dwyer's latest work. But only just.

As a city centre schoolboy in the Dublin of the 1960s, I can recall that violent death was ...