Harold Shand is a historical footnote nowadays, but in the late 1970s he was a major figure in London's underworld. He had the foresight to identify London's docklands as a major property development opportunity, but after an aborted attempt to obtain financing from the American Mafia in 1980 he vanished, his crime empire vanishing with him.
There's a terrific documentary about his eventual fall, The Long Good Friday, in which Shand is played by Bob Hoskins. I think most people assume he was bumped off by the Mafia, but the film hypothesises that it was actually the IRA that did him in. The film's thesis is that one of Shand's underlings double-crossed the IRA, which prompted the organisation to methodically dismantle Shand's world.
Famously The Long Good Friday was completed in 1979 but not released for a year because it was so controversial. The IRA had attacked numerous civilian targets in London during the 1970s and had recently shot dead Ross McWhirter, so the film's original producers were nervous of releasing anything that featured the IRA, even though the film treats them ambivalently. George Harrison's Handmade Films eventually picked it up. The film established Hoskins as a star and is fondly remembered today as a classic. Everybody remembers the scene with the meathooks.
As with Barry Lyndon it's fascinating to imagine how Shand might have rescued the situation. Harold Shand and Barry Lyndon were both aggressive, driven men who were completely unable to compromise or restrain themselves; they both had good advice from the women in their lives but ignored it. The Long Good Friday has a sequence in which Shand tries to buy off the IRA, which might have worked - but he's so convinced of his invincibility that he has the IRA contact killed, which seals his fate.
Could Shand had survived? Presumably he would have had to eat humble pie and offer the IRA something they wanted; cash wouldn't have been enough, he would presumably have to collaborate with them somehow. Perhaps by agreeing to hire only Irish workers for his developments, or by allowing his properties to be used by the IRA, or something along those lines. Whether the American Mafia would support this, or not, I have no idea; it may or may not have made it easier for Shand to deal with Ken Livingston's GLC, which also tried to buy off the IRA.
In our world the IRA generally concentrated on military targets in London during the 1980s, switching to the City and Docklands in the 1990s - at the very least their attacks during that period made strategic sense, whereas in the 1970s they were just randomly massacring civilians - but again whether a deal with a prominent London property developer would have caused them to seek targets elsewhere, or would have made things worse, I have no idea.
I suppose the fundamental question is whether Shand was any use to the IRA. The Long Good Friday implies that he's a major mob boss, but his empire seems very small-scale, but I can't tell if that's simply because the film had a low budget; he comes across as a legend in his own lunchtime.