It was ironic that the Provisional IRA’s announcement yesterday that it was abandoning the bomb and the gun for the ballot box was apparently delayed for some days, because of the intense media spotlight on a new wave of bombers spreading death and destruction in London for a different cause.
In the 30 years up to the cease-fire in 1997, more than 3,600 people died in the violence in Northern Ireland and bombings on the UK mainland. The Good Friday Agreement the following year led to the restoration of devolved government to the province in 2002 but two years later London resumed control. This was ostensibly because of the exposure of an IRA spy ring but in reality it was because moderate Protestants had despaired of the IRA delivering on its decommissioning promises. Since then politics has polarized. Moderate Protestant leaders have been rejected in favor of the uncompromising hard-line approach of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party. Equally the middle-of-the-road Catholic SDLP has lost political ground to Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing under its president Gerry Adams.
Those who feared this polarization could mark the beginning of a return to violence overlooked the fact that Sinn Fein, with its newfound political strength, recognized that there was now a peaceful avenue to obtain its ends. Though its ultimate goal remains a united Ireland, a high level of political power in the North (which it lacks in the South of Ireland) now enables it to fight for the Republican rights in the province and closer economic ties to the South, which in time will bring about a de facto if not actual political reunion.
Besides which, if the EU’s larger political unification campaign succeeds, in another 30 years from now, there might be no borders to be torn down.
The IRA’s opponents maintain that the organization has not delivered on past decommissioning promises. They, therefore, are not sure that this is really the end of what they called terrorism and the Republicans called the armed struggle. The truth, however, is that IRA violence had run its course. Once it had itself been the victim of terrorist violence on 9/11, the romantic US appetite to support “the boys” in the Emerald Isle evaporated. Worse, the IRA’s reputation was tarred by sordid criminal activities including a $50 million bank robbery and the murder of Northern Ireland Catholics who had stood up to IRA thugs. Not only was there nothing more to be gained from the armed struggle; there was much to be lost from continuing it.
The pity about yesterday’s announcement was that no one in the IRA thought to regret the massive loss of innocent life, for which its operations, as well as those of Protestant gangs had been responsible. Innocent people in London, in Sharm El-Sheikh and in Iraq are meeting similarly pointless deaths in terror campaigns that will all end one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, in dialogue.
