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Can Republicanism Survive Without the IRA?

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Deaglan de Breadun, in the Irish Times (3-26-05):

Winston Churchill famously said in the aftermath of the first World War: "The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world."

However, Churchill could still observe today, as he did in his House of Commons speech in 1922, that "as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world".

But if little has altered on the surface in Northern Ireland, the basis for profound and fundamental change has existed since 1998 when the electorates on both sides of the Border approved the Belfast Agreement. The consensus in mainstream Irish politics is that the sole remaining obstacle to full implementation of the agreement is the continued existence of the Irish Republican Army, despite scepticism in some quarters that, even then, unionists will still find an excuse not to share power with nationalists. ...

But can republicanism survive without the IRA, and will its adherents adapt to life without the comforting presence of a private army? Prof Richard English, author of Armed Struggle: A History of the IRA (Macmillan, 2003), believes they can. "I don't think there's anything inevitable about most republicans being committed to armed struggle: they judged that Northern Ireland circumstances demanded it at a particular time," he says.

It's all about power. "The key question now is: how ambitious are republicans? If they really want to hold power in Belfast and Dublin, then the IRA has probably now become slightly more of a hindrance than an advantage....

Dr Michael Laffan of UCD sees Adams and Martin McGuinness facing a similar dilemma to previous leaders in the republican movement.

In 1926, for example, Eamon de Valera "abandoned the wild men whose support he had needed at the time of the Treaty split, and he decided to operate within political structures that he had condemned".

Similar choices were forced at different times on Michael Collins, Sean MacBride and republican leaders in the 1960s such as Cathal Goulding, he points out.

"In each of these four cases acceptance of political realities, of what was described at the time of the Treaty as 'the tyranny of facts', provoked a breach with those who chose purity over the pursuit of power," says Prof Laffan.

Historian and author Dr Eamon Phoenix says: "The vast numbers of new voters turning to SF on both sides of the Border are keen to see the republican movement cast off the albatross of the IRA and paramilitarism and ventilate their specific concerns in a constitutional way."...