"A lot of it's got to do with age" said Paul Bew during a tutorial on Irish politics some years ago. "Running around shooting people and spending the night in a hedgerow - it's a young man's game. Adams, McGuinness, the lot of them: they're middle-aged now. If nothing else, the peace process is a great advert for the male menopause." As ever Bew was exaggerating slightly for effect, but his words had more than a little truth to them. A quarter century of constant physical danger takes it toll on even the most determined men.
Men of a certian age feel the need to justify the excesses of their youth. For most guys this involves accounting for a bit of drunken tomfoolery in years past. But for those who were involved in the IRA's "long war" it means explaining away the murder of 1800 people, many of them civilians. In the past month or so, as the Provos' "historic" statement grew closer, I noticed that some ex-IRA men who are now scribblers have taken it upon themselves to justify their actions all those years ago.
The Menopausal Tendency have been in full flow of late. They start with the conclusion that the present political atmosphere justifies the years of klling and then try to fit the narrative around it. So they re-write history, ignoring the fact that the IRA's stated aim was (and is) the end of British rule in Ireland. Instead they assert that what the Provos wanted all along was not unity but equality and justice. The IRA, according to the ageing revisionists, was a sort of civil rights group with balaclavas.
All those limbs lost, all those children orphaned, not for "a nation once again" but for "an Ireland of equals". All that stuff about "ending British occupation" sure, that was just a bit of craic, these balding men seem to suggest. It was all about creating powersharing government and reform of the police force.
For those who truly believed that they were murdering for a united Ireland, this is troubling news. For the IRA did not just inflict suffering, it endured a lot itself. The organisation lost hundreds of its members during the Troubles, with thousands more spending years in prison. It may be painful for the Process Provos to contemplate this fact. As they walk past the monuments and murals to the IRA's dead, do the names of old friends taunt them? Do they cry out "Did I die so you could have a second house in Donegal?"?
For former priosners there is the added agony of contemplating all that lost time. These men gave the best years of their lives for a political ideal which has now been abandoned. They are middle-aged now, bald and fat. In their twenties and thirties when they should have been starting families or chasing women, they spent every day staring at four grey walls.
For the honest Provo (if such a person exists) there is no denying that all this sacrifice was in vain. But middle-aged men are not always the best at admitting that circumstances have changed.
"I still have a full head of hair. These jeans still fit me. I still think I was right to plant that bomb."