Characterizing the Provisionals has been a central issue in Northern Irish politics since the 1970s. Throughout the Troubles, it has proven difficult to fit Provisionalism into the theoretical categories of conventional politics. Stressing the ‘traditional’ nature of Republicanism or situating it solely within a terrorist paradigm ignores the complexities of the contemporary movement. ‘Terrorology’ is as useful as theology in explaining the emergence of New Sinn Féin over the last sixteen years.

Events since the signing of the Belfast Agreement have confirmed the scale of this transformation. The Provisionals’ participation in the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement ‘was a departure no previous Republican has endorsed. Not even de Valera when he departed Sinn Féin in 1926 argued that Republicans should end abstentionism in the context of parliamentary representation in Northern Ireland.’ The vast ideological distance that the Provisionals have travelled during the peace process was highlighted even more dramatically by Sinn Féin's cooperating with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to form a restored executive in 2007. To understand the dramatic shift in Republican politics, we need to understand Provisionalism's contradictory character as a hybrid combination of bureaucratic political party, popular protest movement and military organization. For most of its history, this was an inherently unstable ideological and organizational form: the peace process itself was a prolonged working through of some of these contradictions, resulting in a new form of Provisionalism. Sinn Féin, according to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, has ‘done its utmost to move away from its past’, and so is now deemed an acceptable partner in government by even its most vehement former enemies in the DUP.