‘Let's not kid ourselves that we are better than… the Sticks were or Fianna Fáil’

By 2007, the Provisionals’ long journey into Northern Ireland's political mainstream seemed complete. From sitting in a ‘partitionist assembly at Stormont’ through to the decommissioning of IRA weapons, and now jointly heading a devolved government with the DUP, the previously unthinkable had become the commonplace for the Provisionals. Taking responsibility for policing and taking the pledge of office upholding the rule of law were more than just symbolic acts to restore devolution. Recognizing the state's legitimate monopoly of violence and its ultimate right to enforce its will marked ‘the irrevocable final step away from trying to overthrow the state’. Given what these symbols represented for longstanding Republican aims, the belief that this acceptance of ‘Britain's illegal claim to sovereignty in Ireland’ and ‘their total immersion into the English system in Ireland’ constituted defeats seemed accurate.

There were other signs of significant political change within the Provisional movement. Twelve years after the first IRA ceasefire it seemed that the balance of power within the movement had finally shifted away from the armalite towards the ballot box. The IRA statement of July 2005, instructing volunteers to dump arms and ‘assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means … to advance our Republican and democratic objectives, including our goal of a united Ireland’ appeared to end the central ambiguity in Provisionalism between electoral politics and the military instrument. Other evidence in 2006 seemed to confirm that the IRA was indeed going away: according to the Gardai, the Provisionals had ‘abandoned organized crime’ in the Irish Republic, while the Independent Monitoring Commission's eleventh report in September 2006 declared that: