When Maria McGuire fled Ireland in the company of The Observer reporter Colin Smith in September 1972, dropping her Walther 7.65 automatic pistol into a waste bin at Dublin airport, she had good reason to fear for her life.

The young Dublin graduate was pioneering a path taken by many more: for those who dared to cross the leadership of the Provisional IRA there lay ahead a life to be spent in the shadows with a constant backward glance, fearful of strangers.

The year 1972 would turn out to be the bloodiest of the Troubles, with a death toll of 496.

The IRA’s victims that year included children as young as 8, many teenagers and mothers caught in its crossfire.

Other innocents were accused of collaborating with the “occupation forces” and summarily killed.

The bodies of Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, two West Belfast Roman Catholics, have never been found. There were the first murders carried out for “touting” — passing information to the security forces – tried by a kangaroo court then shot in the back of the head.

A year after To Take Arms: My Year in the Provisional IRA had gone into its second edition, Seán MacStiofáin got his right to reply.

The former chief of staff of the Provisionals, now sidelined by his comrades after an embarrassing hunger strike, published his own memoir, entitled Revolutionary in Ireland. MacStiofáin said that Ms McGuire was “never a member of the IRA except in her own dramatic imagination” but his attempts to minimise her role foundered on her presence in Amsterdam with David O’Connell on an arms-buying mission.

His fury rose when she trained her sights on him in newspaper articles and her book, branding him a murderous sectarian bigot. He admitted that she had published “a good deal of fact based on confidential information she had no right to have” and he concluded his observations on a particularly poisonous note. “The psychological warfare specialists who tried to exploit Maria McGuire had failed to understand something that goes very deep in the psychology of the Irish people. They cannot stand a traitor.”

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