The battle of history begins
It's not quite nailed down yet, but it seems that a new agreement may soon be reached between the DUP and Sinn Fein (SF) over the governance of Northern Ireland (NI). There is now much speculation in the north that part of this deal will involve the standing down of the Provisional IRA.
If all goes according to plan, the organisation, which in my not-too-distant youth was one of the world's most feared terrorist outfits, will soon be little more than an "old comrades club". The IRA's members, who were once notorious fo their ruthlessness and dedication, may soon be better known as boring old farts sitting in the pub telling interminable anecdotes about the good old days in the Kesh.
I find this a startling prospect. If you'd told me ten years ago that by 2005 there'd be no more IRA, I'd have laughed in your face. Back then the Provos had an air of permanence to them. To say that there'd be no more IRA would have seemed only slightly less ridiculous than suggesting that one day there'd be no more rain or no more Aprils.
But times change and it's great, for once, to have some good news. As the group responsible for more than half of the deaths during the Troubles, I will not miss the IRA. So long chaps and thanks for nothing.
If it is true that the Provos are soon to shuffle off into the past tense, this begs the question, how will history judge them? In my opinion, the verdict must be damning. The immense suffering they inflicted achieved little, perhaps even nothing. Even if one believes that the IRA's campaign was morally justifiable (and I don't), one still has to contend with the fact that it was politically stupid.
First off, some context. The IRA in its current incarnation emerged from the trauma of 1969 when Catholic areas of the North were left undefended against loyalist and police mobs. The Provos initial justification for their existence was the need to defend these areas. To be fair, some of its early actions fell within these parameters of defence.
However, the newly invigorated IRA quickly turned to the opffensive, using continuing British rule in Ireland as its raison d'etre. Lacking the resources to inflict defeat on British forces in a conventional military sense, the IRA settled into a pattern of guerilla warfare - sniper attacks, bombings, mortar strikes. This was their "long war" strategy, a plan to wear down British resolve through sheer attrition.
The human cost of this policy on the miniscule population of NI is all too familiar - 1800 dead, thousands more wounded, untold numbers grieving, or otherwise psychologically scarred. Ironically, for a group whic portrayed itself as the protector of the Catholic population, the IRA killed more Catholics than the British army and the RUC combined.
But what was the political impact of the long war? It is an unavoidable conclusion that for most of its existence, the IRA has helped to entrench direct rule, a form of political stasis which was more palatable to unionists than nationalists. Their violence prolonged this stasis by providing a pretext for successive British governments to refuse to embark on radical reform of the North.
This of course was not the IRA's intention, it was an explicitly revolutionary organisation, but it was the result. For proof one need only look at the changes which have come since the IRA abandoned its long war strategy in the early 1990s. Things like reform of the police, North-South bodies and powersharing government could have come much sooner than they did.
The great tragedy is that the IRA's violence was so utterly pointless. Seamus Mallon was dead right when he described the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 as "Sunningdale for slow learners". Thousands of lives were lost while the IRA and sections of unionism overcame their political dyslexia. By going for "victory" the IRA strengthened the hand of refusenik unionists in London and Belfast with their counter-productive "security" solutions to what has always been a political problem.
The Provos traditionally disparaged the politics of non-violent nationalism as practiced by the SDLP. They clung tenacioulsy to the notion that democratic peaceful politics was impossible in a place such as NI. But they exaggerated the scale of oppression in the North. For all that NI at the time wasn't perfect, neither was it Soweto or Gaza. The space for non-violent politics always existed.
The fact is that the SDLP achieved a lot during the Troubles: Sunnningdale, the All-Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the engagement with Irish-America; these were all achievements of an Irish nationalist party which had no guns and no semtex. How much more could have been achieved if only the Provos had stopped sooner? History will show that the nationalist people benefit from having, as they do now, two SDLPs rather than just one.
If the IRA does disband, it will pass away in neither victory nor defeat. It has clearly not achieved its goal of a united Ireland, but neither has it been smashed, as was so often promised by London. It's hard to know what retiring members of the IRA will make of their long campaign. However I hope that some of them will be able to admit, even if it's only to themselves, that, in political terms, it wasn't worth it.