Tag Archives: IRA Sealadach (Provisional Irish Republican Army/PIRA)

Lies, Damned Lies And The War In Ireland

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Journalist Martina Devlin sets the readership of the Irish Independent (and others) fairly hopping with outrage over her latest opinion piece. Can she be long for the Indo Group? One suspects not. In Ireland’s news media élite being More-British-Than-The-British is considered de rigueur. But it’s fun while it lasts:

“It’s the blatant revisionism that gets my goat: the deception being peddled that the IRA was solely responsible for the Troubles and therefore culpable for all the evils of the Northern state.

According to this false gospel, the IRA initiated the violence and continued it alone. Sooner or later those nice unionists would have realised it was wrong to deny equality to their fellow citizens, and knuckled down to cut a deal with the SDLP. But the IRA’s self-serving agenda derailed the potential for agreement to be reached, delaying the formation of a just society.

Herman Melville’s novel ‘White-Jacket’ contains the following passage: “You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper [underling] of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong but are useless for right.” Melville was suggesting that moderates allow iniquity to be perpetuated because they do not challenge the status quo, and never support what is sometimes necessary to expunge tyranny — such as the tyranny of the Northern state, where ethnic cleansing lite was tolerated and citizens were denied fundamental human rights. There is more than one kind of violence.

This acceptance by revisionists of subjugation in the North allows them to claim it was wrong to resist the status quo, except peacefully. Conveniently, they forget how the agents of the state used rifles and batons to force civil rights campaigners off the streets. They ignore statistics showing how one sector of Northern society was favoured for jobs and housing at the expense of another. Left to them, the Northern state would have stayed gerrymandered, defective, deviant.

Politicians in the Republic countenanced gross inequalities in the state on their doorstep, perpetuated against people who defined themselves as Irish. Few commentators or voters called them on it. Yes, IRA violence was remorseless, but what caused it — and, more important, who helped bring it to an end? As history books about this period are written, whose names figure on their pages?

My final thought on the North is this: peace-makers are thin on the ground compared with bomb-makers.”

Just for the record, and to meet head-on the propagators of counter-factual myths that pass for history in the Anglomedia ranks, some salient facts.

The so-called “Troubles” did not begin at the end of 1969 with the formation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, or in the early months of 1970 with the first attacks by PIRA units (the first British soldier was not killed until 1971!). In fact the conflict had been going on for several years previous to this (the Provisional IRA came into existence on the 28th of December 1969. The day before on the 27th the UVF carried out a bomb attack in Dublin city!).

The first violence, the first killings, the first shootings, the first bombings of the Troubles began in 1966. Over a period of several months terrorists from the British separatist minority in Ireland, the UVF, murdered three people, two Roman Catholic men and a Protestant woman, as well as injuring a number of others and causing substantial damage to property. The objective was simple, something they made clear in a statement issued to the general public:

“From this day, we declare war against the Irish Republican Army and its splinter groups. Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation. Less extreme measures will be taken against anyone sheltering or helping them, but if they persist in giving them aid, then more extreme methods will be adopted… we solemnly warn the authorities to make no more speeches of appeasement. We are heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause.”

And the cause? Killing Irish men, women and children, and driving those who survived from the last remnants of Britain’s colony in Ireland. This is the start of the Troubles. The British ethnic minority in Ireland using violence and the threat of violence to intimidate and terrorise the majority population on the island. As it was throughout the last 300 years.

The Facts of the Troubles the Media don’t want you to know:

The first shooting of civilian targets in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1966.

The first bombing of civilian targets in the “Troubles? British terrorists, 1968.

The first ethnic cleansing of civilian targets in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first killing of a paramilitary police officer in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first bombing of a capital city in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first armed action of the Provisional IRA in the “Troubles”? 1970

The first killing of a British soldier in the “Troubles”? 1971

Do we need to go on?

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The History House – Armagh’s Irish Republican Museum

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Fascinating article in the Guardian on the ‘History House’, a private Irish Republican museum open to invitation-only guests:

‘In a garden in a quiet cul-de-sac in north Armagh, a nondescript brown shed contains the Irish republican version of the Imperial War Museum.

The private collection contains the toilet-roll holder from the room where IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands died in May 1981, letters from supporters to Sands, an original rebel uniform from the 1916 Easter rising, secret communications smuggled out of the Maze prison and a 19th-century cell door from London’s Pentonville jail where Irish republican prisoners were incarcerated. There are piles of original black rubber bullets fired during riots in the early 1970s. There are even Airfix-style models recreating the Maze prison.

Its owner – who lost close relatives during the Troubles – is so security-conscious he doesn’t allow his name or the museum’s address to be published. All visits are arranged quietly on the “republican grapevine”, but have managed to bring together former republican rivals who were once deadly enemies. Former members of the Provisional and Official IRAs as well as the Irish National Liberation army have met again during private visits to the collection. Earlier this month the surviving “hooded men” – republican suspects used as “torture guinea-pigs” by the British army early in the Troubles in 1971 – gathered together for the first time in a reunion at the museum.

The Guardian was given access last week to the privately owned museum which also hosts visits by foreign tourists and even some Ulster loyalists. And the “curator” of the “History House” revealed that officials from the Republic’s National Museum of Ireland in Dublin recently paid a visit.

“They wanted to buy some of the artefacts, but I wasn’t for selling,” the owner said. “I want this museum to remain private yet accessible and completely free. I would never charge a penny to those I allow to view it.”

Over more than two decades he has amassed a vast array of flags, badges, posters, the casings of bullets fired from IRA rifles during the Troubles and even a crystal radio set smuggled into the Maze so that the H-Block prisoners could track the news of Sands’s triumph in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election the month before he died.

The collection also includes an original copy of the IRA’s so-called Green Book, the code of practice for armed republicans drawn up in the 1950s. From the same era, the owner of the “History House” has put on display the steel cups IRA prisoners drank from inside the Victorian Crumlin Road jail in Belfast.

Among other artefacts are two Celtic-style crosses. Both were made from matchsticks because prison authorities denied the IRA inmates access to woodwork material. One comes from an IRA man held in Crumlin Road jail in the 1950s; the other is from the 21st century and was hand-crafted in his cell by a republican dissident prisoner.

“These crosses show how Irish republican history sometimes goes in circles,” the owner said. “In the 50s, the authorities would not give republicans wood for them to make Celtic crosses, Irish harps and other Irish traditional crafts. They cited security reasons but the prisoners showed ingenuity by using matchsticks instead. They are citing the same reason today in Maghaberry jail [where prisoners are challenging conditions], and the dissident republicans are resorting back to the same tactics as their predecessors.”

As if to underline his point, the owner displayed two more artefacts from his museum. They were a poster from the 1970s highlighting the case of Martin Corey, a Provisional IRA prisoner and Lurgan republican and a huge Irish Harp he made with his own hands while incarcerated in the Maze. He added that Corey is currently back in jail, locked up in Maghaberry, this time as a prisoner on the Continuity IRA wing.’

To access the audio-video show click here.

For information on Belfast’s better known Iarsmalann na Staire Poblachtach Éireannach or Irish Republican History Museum (which is open to the general public) click here.

 

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We’re Alright Paddy, To Hell With You

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Well a relatively peaceful night has passed in the North of Ireland, with violence down to what we might almost describe as ‘peace-time levels’. This is in contrast to the events of Wednesday night when widespread street clashes were still occurring (albeit mostly confined to Irish Nationalist communities) involving confrontations between local youths and the PSNI (the British paramilitary police in Ireland). Though on a smaller scale than in previous days and confined to smaller areas (mainly Belfast and Derry) the conflict on Wednesday was serious enough, involving as it did large numbers of young men and women, hundreds of PSNI officers, and considerable damage to local homes, businesses and vehicles. As reported by the BBC:

‘Police have been attacked with petrol bombs, paint bombs and missiles in Portadown, Belfast and Londonderry [Derry].

A police car and two private vehicles were damaged during the disturbances in the Garvaghy Road-Ballyoran area of Portadown on Wednesday.

Police were also targeted in west Belfast and Derry.

Petrol bombs and stones were thrown at officers during a four-hour period in the Brandywell and Gobnascale area of Derry city.

In Belfast a petrol bomb failed to ignite when it was thrown at Tennant Street PSNI station. A police spokesperson said nobody was injured during the trouble.

There were also reports of a number of hijackings.’

Additionally, though underreported by local or international media, there was a slow but steady stream of violent assaults on Irish communities throughout the North by gangs from the British Unionist population, as can be seen in some of the areas of trouble mentioned above. In North Belfast clashes between the PSNI and Unionists on Wednesday happened as the result of attacks on nearby Nationalist homes.

A separate incident is described in a UTV report:

‘Two members of an Ardoyne-based football team have been seriously injured after they were set upon by an armed loyalist gang in north Belfast on the Twelfth of July, it has emerged.

The Crumlin Star football team were returning from a trip to Dundalk in Co Louth, to escape the trouble surrounding the annual Orange Order parade close to their north Belfast homes, when they were attacked by the 30-strong gang.

A gang carrying knives, golf clubs and sticks beat several members of the team, leaving them with stab wounds, a broken leg and facial injuries.

One player was held down and jumped on until his leg broke and his foot was fractured.

Ciaran Smyth, who plays for a cross-community football team, was attacked with a golf club while trying to help a friend.

“It was still daylight when we were attacked. Most of them were wearing Rangers football shirts.

“That gang were out to cause serious injury or even kill the first Catholic they came across and it just happened to be us.”’

One of the more amusing aspects of the last few days has been the editorials and commentary of the British media, the majority of which have downplayed the trouble, usually by comparing it to the height of the conflict when IRA bombs were devastating British city centres and IRA units were targeting British troops. Which of course for the British is the only thing that really matters. For as long as British towns and city centres are left untouched and British soldiers unharmed the average British journalist, or politician or citizen doesn’t give a damn about Ireland or any trouble in Ireland. To them that is peace.

A fact that others know all too well.

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Loyalty Versus Counter-Insurgency – Or What To Do When The British No Longer Need You?

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Jason Walsh Reporting In The CSM

Excellent reporting from Jason Walsh in the CS Monitor on yesterday’s UVF-led rioting in Belfast, asking the questions you’re unlikely to hear asked by most Irish and British journalists.

‘”For some weeks, there has been sporadic instances of antisocial stone-throwing across the interface in this area,” said Belfast’s Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile, who is a member of the republican party Sinn Féin and a resident of the area. “Local community representatives and politicians have been trying to deal with it with some success. It is important that this good work continues.

“However, what happened last night was not antisocial behavior or a sectarian riot,” he stated. “What happened was a well planned and orchestrated attack on the Catholic community in the Short Strand by the UVF.”

He says that the UVF’s activities in East Belfast have been a cause for concern for some time. “There has been a marked increase in UVF flag-flying, the painting of new paramilitary murals, and significant agitation around Loyal Order parades,” Mr. Ó Donnghaile says.

The UVF, founded in 1966 – three years before the Northern Irish conflict started in earnest – was one of the two pro-British paramilitary organizations involved in the conflict. A total of 481 killings have been attributed to the group. A leading member, Bobby Moffet, was shot dead by members of his own organization in 2009. Earlier in 2009, the group declared it has decommissioned its weapons.

The Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, led by retired Canadian General John de Chastelain, oversaw the decommissioning process. Despite this, fears have arisen that a new generation is attempting to seize power within the organization – and is willing to return to sectarian violence in order to achieve it.

A community activist working in Protestant east Belfast, who did not wish to be identified, told the Monitor the attacks were a result of a power struggle within loyalist paramilitarism.

“You have to look at what’s happening within the UVF: the loss of leadership and loss of control,” he says. “The east Belfast [brigade of the] UVF is flexing its muscles.”‘

It is claimed that another factor destabilizing the leadership of the UVF (as with other British Unionist terrorist groupings) is the activities of the Historical Enquiries Team, or HET, a unit of the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), which is investigating a number of ‘cold case crimes’ from throughout the history of the conflict. Though the HET has been examining murders and other incidences by all sides involved in the ’Long War’ some Unionists have claimed that the unit is primarily focused on the activities of Unionist paramilitaries. This has been dismissed by others as a smokescreen for militant Unionist factions now lacking a direction or focus, and who have in recent years turned on their own communities with an increased involvement in criminal activities, including drug dealing, racketeering, loansharking and prostitution.

Ironically the removal of much of their previous quasi-official status as a counter-insurgency arm of the British state in its decades-long war with armed Irish Republicans movements, has left Unionist paramilitaries ’out in the cold’, lacking real political representatives, power or influence. In previous times links with the British Intelligence agencies (primarily MI5 or the Security Service), the paramilitary police (the now disbanded Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC – forerunner of the PSNI), the British Army and various mainstream Unionist political parties, guaranteed the Unionist terrorists a substantive say in the politics of the North.

The Belfast Agreement has largely negated that influence and some Unionist paramilitaries feel ‘used and abused’ by the British state. Other Unionist terrorist leaders, however, have been seen to have garnered considerable personal wealth in the aftermath of the conflict and to have distanced themselves from their former comrades and communities. Some, especially amongst the younger generation of militant Unionists, are also increasingly questioning the claims of the older leaderships that the position of ‘Northern Ireland’ under British rule is secure and feel that the Nationalist community is increasingly in the ascendant.

A number of recent rows in the political arena, at Stormont, Belfast City Hall and elsewhere have illustrated mainstream Unionist unease which is finding a ready expression amongst the militant hard edge of Unionism. The North of Ireland’s dysfunctional, schizophrenic nature seems set to continue even as the sticking plaster of the Belfast Agreement looks increasingly frayed around the edges.

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UVF Organised Attacks On Nationalist Enclave

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Confirmation today that the East Belfast wing of the British Unionist terrorist group, the UVF, organised the sustained assault on the Irish Nationalist enclave of the Short Strand last night, in the east of the city. Up to 500 Unionists, many in paramilitary clothing, took part in the attacks, with the Nationalist community of the Strand coming under fire from stones, bottles, petrol bombs, blast bombs and gun shoots. Amongst numerous injuries is reported the wounding of three men in an exchange of gun fire, as well as major damage to homes and other property, with a number of families being forced to flee their houses.

From UTV:

‘Two people received gunshot wounds to the leg when a total of 11 shots were fired during the violence in the lower Newtownards Road area, which erupted at around 9pm on Monday and lasted for more than four hours.

A number of petrol bombs were also thrown during the disturbance close to the Short Stand interface, which involved around 500 loyalist and nationalist rioters, including men wearing balaclavas and camouflage.

Bricks, bottles, fireworks and smoke bombs were also thrown and homes damaged in what police called a “high-level, life-threatening, organised, serious and sustained” attack by people “hell-bent on disorder”.

Police said members of the Ulster Volunteer Force were initially behind the violence, but the gun shots were fired from both sides of the community.’

The Guardian reports:

‘Sinn Féin blamed scores of masked men, who a party representative said were wearing camouflage clothing and surgical gloves, for launching co-ordinated attacks on the Catholic Short Strand area.

The Belfast mayor, Niall Ó Donnghaile, a councillor based in the Short Strand area, said a number of residents had been injured, including one man knocked unconscious when he was hit with a brick.

Ó Donnghaile said: “There is no doubt that this was unprovoked and was a carefully orchestrated and planned attack on the area. Homes have been attacked with petrol bombs and paint bombs, bricks, golf balls. I saw what happened.”‘

It is reported that a number of shots were fired from the direction of St. Matthews Church towards Unionist rioters in an eerie echo of the very earliest years of the conflict in the North of Ireland, when members of the Irish Republican Army defended the local Nationalist enclave from attacks by Unionist mobs in the Battle of St. Matthews, one of the major contributions towards the growth of the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s. However the BBC reports:

‘The PSNI said there was nothing to suggest that members of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) had fired shots and it was too early to say if dissident republicans were involved as their investigations were continuing.’

In recent months the UVF has been attempting to reassert its authority in Unionist areas of Belfast, following a period of relative inactivity. The terrorist grouping is thought to be undergoing considerable tensions over the direction and control of the organisation with dissension in its leadership. The UVF has a notorious record for its terrorist campaign in Ireland, much of it under the direction of the British state, with the British Intelligence services, Army and paramilitary police exercising considerable control over the group in previous decades, as well as helping to arm and fund it.

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The Irish Republican Army Way – And The Taliban Way

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Volunteers of an Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army preparing for a foot-patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

Volunteers of an Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army preparing for a foot-patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

The War Nerd (aka Gary Brecher aka John Dolan) examines the Long War military and political strategies of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army versus that of the Taliban in an interesting, if at times flawed and occasionally uninformed, article.

Several claims are clearly open to question:

The IRA never used all its strength, played very cautiously, did just enough mayhem to remind Britain they were still around, hadn’t been broken. They even refused to do vengeance attacks on the UDA/UFF/UVF/LVF “Loyalist” hit squads that would kill Catholic civvies to try to force the IRA into a tit-for-tat Catholic vs. Protestant gang war.

True and untrue. The Irish Republican Army undoubtedly did at times reserve its full potential, and when necessary exercised a precise use of military force if leverage was required elsewhere (as in the political arena where strikes in Britain became regular exclamation points in the secret negotiations with the British government). It also, officially, had no truck with engaging in communal warfare with the British Unionist minority in Ireland. But official policies and what was happening on the ground (and what the Army Council and GHQ Staff were prepared to sanction at times) were very different things indeed. And to many in the Unionist community the killing of members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (or RUC, the British paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland from 1922 to 2001) or the Ulster Defence Regiment (or UDR, a branch of the British Army that functioned as a Unionist militia in the North from 1970 to 1992, until disbanded by the British as reciprocal part of the Peace Process) were seen as direct attacks on them since these forces were drawn exclusively from their community.

An Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army receiving arms training at a mountain camp in Co. Donegal, Ireland, c.1980s

Some observations however are true (if overstated in the context of the conflict in the Occupied North):

It’s not how guerrilla war works at all, for an obvious reason that I should’ve realized: Guerrilla armies always represent the weaker, the smaller, the defeated side. Not necessarily smaller in population but in money, cohesion, power-projection. They win, not by battlefield victory, but by something like metal fatigue. They sag on their opponents like a fat heavyweight, they wear him out, they absorb his punches.

Others mix truth with an unintended comedy of ignorance:

The IRA had this “Nerf” strategy of not striking back at stuff like this, and not killing civilians, which seemed weak to me. But it worked way, way better than I could have imagined. First of all, by not reacting to LVF hit teams, the IRA kept the focus on the Brits, who they considered the real enemy. The Loyalist hit teams, I realize now, were a classic SAS attempt to turn the whole Ulster fight into a tribal war, so the British could come off as the impartial referees trying to keep the savages from tearing each other apart. If the IRA had settled for taking all these Loyalists down into nice soundproofed basements and giving them some hands-on experience of their favorite games, it would’ve been satisfying short-term but would have fed right into the enemy propaganda model.

An Active Service Unit of the Irish Republican Army sets up a vehicle-checkpoint, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

An Active Service Unit of the Irish Republican Army sets up a vehicle-checkpoint, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

One wonders what the CIRA, RIRA and ÓnahÉ would think of the following analysis?

In contemporary urban guerrilla warfare, at least in Western Europe, killing civvies is counterproductive. What you want to do, what the IRA had mastered by the 1990s, was messing with the incredibly fragile and expensive networks that keep a huge city going. Interrupt them and you cost the enemy billions of dollars, and they don’t even have any gory corpses to shake in your faces. Fucking brilliant, and I was too dumb to see it!

And finally the conclusion that the Peace Process was largely the creation of the leadership of the Republican Movement and that it:

…set free every IRA prisoner, dissolved the old apartheid police (RUC) and set up a new one that went out recruiting in the same slums the IRA drew its people from (PSIS), and put Adams and McGuinness in power in a local Northern Ireland Assembly to replace the old No Papists one. Sinn Fein is now the biggest political party in the place and the Brits have basically conceded all the territory west of the Bann River to them. It’s the Loyalists who seem all confused and drifting now… Martin McGuinness, ex-IRA officer and Sinn Fein “terrorist,” is the Deputy Prime Minister… Meanwhile, Adams is pushing the party into the South as well…

It’s hard for an American to get your head around any of this, but the point, and it’s very “counter-intuitive” as they say, is that Al Qaeda did everything wrong, spending all their assets and going for maximum kill, and the IRA, the poster-boy for long, slow, crock-pot guerrilla warfare, did it exactly right. In fact, it’s sort of scary how Adams and/or McGuinness seem to have thought three or four moves ahead every step of the way…

And they did it against the Brits, too, the SAS, best counterinsurgency specialists in the world, too. What can I say? I was absolutely wrong… Al Qaeda style maximum-splatter is for hotheaded idiots who forget that the real job of a guerrilla force is to stay in existence, lean on the enemy, wear him out and bankrupt him.

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army armed with an RPG-7 rocket-launcher, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army armed with an RPG-7 rocket-launcher, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

Some interesting debating points here. Clearly the present transitional arrangements are not the 32 County Socialist Republic envisioned by some: and are never going to be. But neither is the North of Ireland 2011 a clone of Northern Ireland 1968. That political entity, the last old style part of the British colony in Ireland, is gone: long dead and buried. The North of Ireland is an entity that stands between nations now, with a foot in both camps.

An Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army armed with vehicle-mounted heavy and general-purpose machine guns, British Occupied North of Ireland, c.1980s

The Irish Republican Army may not have won a British timetable for withdrawal but they have won the method by which it will be facilitated and are creating the circumstances in which it will happen. Whether it will be strictly through political means, or take the famous ‘one more push’, is for history to decide. But in having conceded the principal the British have carved the tombstone for the Six County statelet.

Far from the end of Republicanism some would claim, the Belfast Agreement and the Peace Process is the end of Britain’s colonial adventures in Ireland. So the War Nerd, for all his occasional ignorance, simplifications and Americanisms, may well be right after all.

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army armed with an AKM assault rifle on patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army armed with an AKM assault rifle on patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

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The Phoenix Rising?

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The Irish Republican Phoenix – Out of the ashes arose the Provisionals – The Provisional IRA

According to a special investigative report in the British newspaper, the Independent on Sunday, the continuing rise of the Dissident Republican movements in Ireland, and the North in particular, goes on apace with the claim that, ‘Violent paramilitary opposition to the Northern Ireland peace agreement is at its fiercest for 10 years’.

Which, in truth, is not saying that much. In fact, alarmist headlines aside, there is little new in this ‘investigation’ – for an Irish readership anyway. Increasing dissatisfaction within the northern Nationalist community with the pace of the political processes promised by the implementation of the so-called Peace Process (the creation of true cross-border institutions facilitating the reintegration of the North into the national territory, a broad and comprehensive Irish Language Act and other parity of esteem measures) have led to an increased tolerance, if not active support, for anti-Belfast Agreement Republicans (or those who wish to militarily exploit the Agreement as a stepping stone to a United Ireland).

The attitudes of a minority of northern Nationalists, particularly the under-25s whose sense of Irish citizenship is much more sharply defined, is matched by a smaller minority of southern Nationalists (with the Generation G – for Gael – coming to the fore again). The rather forlorn hopes of those who see a fragmented Dissident Republican movement as a sign of weakness is in stark contrast to what is happening on the ground. The old view that northern Nationalists voted SDLP, while supporting the PIRA, could have a new, rather ironic expression: vote Sinn Féin but support CIRA, RIRA, ÓnahÉ, et al.

A Volunteer of the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA) armed with an AKM assault rifle, British Occupied North of Ireland

We are a quiet a way from that yet, but with a more intellectually muscular Nationalism and Republicanism making itself felt in the cultural highways and byways of Ireland, and the Neo-Unionist and British Apologist factions of the Irish political and media establishment on the back-foot (not least in the aftermath of the visit of the British head of state to the Garden of Remembrance) it is very difficult to predict the future. The set of circumstances that gave rise to the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the North of Ireland have changed substantially but the core issues remain: the British Occupation of part of the island of Ireland and part of the Irish people, the continued presence of a significant ethno-national British Unionist minority on the island willing to use violence to maintain the British Occupation, and all the tensions and conflicts that flow from that. The Belfast Agreement was a worthy effort to bring that to an end, or at least to put in place a process that could contain the various hopes and wishes of all parties to the conflict, and for Irish Republicans at least, facilitate an ultimate end to the longest of long wars.

That this process, in some Republican and Nationalist eyes, is moving too slowly or has stalled altogether, is undoubtedly (and unfortunately) one of the driving forces for the current campaign of armed resistance. Perhaps if the political establishment in Ireland had made more effort to reach out to the hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens still living under the foreign occupation that we freed ourselves from several decades ago, to give them a greater inclusion in the Irish nation we all share, we would not be where we are now. But then, perhaps, it is too late for that? Ten years too late: or nearly ten decades.

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