Introduction

An exchange between BBC Radio 4 journalist, John Humphrys and Ireland's Europe minister Helen McEntee in early 2019 in which he suggested that ‘… the Republic of Ireland, leave the EU and throw in their lot with this country [Britain]’ seemed to sum up the destructive impact of Brexit on Anglo– Irish relations (O’Carroll, 2019). In the entirely predictable media spat between politicians and media commentators that erupted on both sides of the Irish Sea, it seemed as if long forgotten memories and historical animosities between Dublin and London had been stirred back into life. After decades of close cooperation during the Northern Irish peace process, hopes for a more harmonious relationship between Ireland and Britain were drowned out in yet another war of words over Brexit. The proximate cause of the current breakdown in Anglo– Irish relations relates to a dispute around the future status and nature of the border between the Republic of Ireland (ROI) and the UK.

The border question emerged as the most vexed issue in the Brexit negotiations when Ireland, with support from the other member states of the EU, refused to countenance a hard economic border on the island of Ireland, suggesting that the UK government must bear sole responsibility for designing a border to satisfy the demands of the Brexiteers. Consequently, in order to secure a withdrawal agreement, the UK either had to accept a de facto customs and regulatory border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain or agree to remain inside the single market and the customs union. The ‘backstop solution’ was designed as a compromise between the British government's promise to deliver Brexit and the promise of no ‘hard border’ on the island of Ireland. However, in taking the UK out of the EU while keeping it aligned to the EU's regulatory framework, customs union and the single market, the backstop had become a major, and potentially fatal, obstacle to winning Parliamentary backing for the withdrawal agreement. Thus, an issue which had hardly featured in the 2016 referendum campaign suddenly became the dominating topic in British politics. However, although both Dublin and London spent two years arguing about the border they seemed not to be talking in the same language.

Introduction: agreed history?

A visitor to the centre of Dublin on Easter Monday 2015 would have found the city en fete as tens of thousands accepted an invitation to ‘Step into History’ and experience ‘the sights and sounds of the capital in 1915’. The area around O'Connell Street had come alive with street theatre, music and vintage attractions as Dubliners in period dress promenaded past the General Post Office (GPO), the headquarters of the Rising, or joined walking tours of significant historical sites. However, if this was commemoration as a jolly family day out, there was also a serious side to the fun. Whilst some came along purely for a ride on the Edwardian carousel, probably just as many packed into venues like the Abbey Theatre or Liberty Hall to hear talks by leading historians about ‘The Ideas of 1916’ or discuss ‘The Irish Language and the Cultural Revolution’.

The spirit of Dublin's ‘Road to the Rising’ reflected many of the strands in the official Decade of Centenaries programme launched in 2011 to commemorate key moments in Irish history between 1912 and 1922. Speaking the language of reconciliation and peace-building, the Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations proposed that the 2016 commemorations should acknowledge ‘the complexity of historical events and their legacy, and of the multiple identities and traditions which are part of the Irish historical experience’. Drawing on the discourse of ‘remembrance, reconciliation and renewal’, and stressing ‘inclusiveness and mutual respect’, these more conciliatory approaches seemed to stand in marked contrast to previous state-supported commemorations, which had been criticized for triumphalism and the glorification of revolutionary violence. As Anne Dolan observed in a recent essay on the relationship between history, memory and commemoration, ‘when has commemoration ever truly been about history? The memorial events for the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising told us more about 1966 than they did about 1916, and 2016's efforts are not likely to be any different.’ In this light, every commemoration since 1917 has held up a mirror to its own times and preoccupations, and every decade has had the 1916 commemoration it deserved.

However, the dominant discourse of parity of esteem and building a shared history amongst all the ‘identities and traditions’ of Ireland did not go unchallenged at Easter 2015.

A violence from the past?

Serious rioting during the 2010 loyal order marching season prompted a predictable debate about Northern Ireland's political future in general, and the condition of the nationalist community in particular. Whilst there was a broad consensus that the disturbances, however severe, did not signal a return to the ‘bad old days of the Troubles’, there was little agreement about their underlying causes and significance. International media coverage, for example, evinced surprise at a turn of events that challenged a widely accepted ‘international ideology of Northern Ireland’ as a radically changed and stable region.

For some, the violence could simply be condemned and dismissed as ‘recreational rioting’ by bored teenagers: using the trope of anti-social behaviour, they blamed feckless parents and a feral youth out of control. Leading politicians from the DUP and Sinn Féin, whilst pursuing their own, distinct agenda, largely agreed with the PSNI's analysis that ‘sinister elements’ were at work behind the scenes. In the wake of the transfer of policing and justice powers to Stormont, the politicians claimed that dissident republicans opposed to ‘dialogue, negotiation and accommodation’ had orchestrated the fighting and were manipulating young people, thereby handing on ‘the baton of hatred … to another generation’.

Other commentators, however, suggested that the causes of the violence were more fundamental, being located in a continuing and unresolved sectarian conflict and segregated ways of living.

‘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:

From Loughgall to Stormont

On 10 May 2007, the Sinn Féin weekly newspaper An Phoblacht carried a front page photograph of a smiling Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness at the swearing-in of Northern Ireland's new devolved executive. Tucked away at the top of the same page was the strapline: ‘Huge Crowds Pay Tribute to Loughgall Martyrs’, referring to a Republican commemoration for eight IRA volunteers killed by the SAS in May 1987. The juxtaposition of the two events was commented on by supporters and critics of the Provisionals as symbolizing the distance that the Provisional movement had travelled in the last twenty years. To the Provisionals’ unrepentant Republican opponents, the new devolved executive ‘solidified English rule’ and was a betrayal of the cause for which the Loughgall volunteers had died. For Martin McGuinness, the distance between Loughgall and the assembly at Stormont was not just a question of time. Speaking at the commemoration, he argued that the journey undertaken ‘by the Republican struggle … [had opened] up … a democratic and peaceful path towards Irish unity and independence’.

It is easy to contrast the statesmanlike rhetoric of 2007 with the militant language of 1987. In 2007, the Provisionals’ ‘primary political objective is to deliver Irish reunification and a genuine process of national reconciliation on the island’: in 1987, Republicans were ‘committed to the armed struggle … [as] the only means by which the British government can be forced to break its stranglehold on political progress and peace’. Given that the initial contacts of the peace process were already underway before Loughgall, the conversion of the Provisionals from militant revolutionaries into constitutional nationalists is already passing from the realm of contemporary politics into that of history. It is an accomplished fact for a political generation whose members are too young to remember the Troubles: to them, veteran Provisionals are simply middle-aged politicians appealing for votes.

The thirty-year war between the Republican movement and the British state has primarily been considered as a military and political conflict: in comparison to these main battlefields, social and economic factors have been relegated to peripheral roles. In particular, the terrain of civil society and its relationship with the state has rarely been theorized as a decisive factor in the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The power of the contemporary state is often characterized by the degree to which it can successfully create and reproduce political and social hegemony, a type of power that rests on complex forms of consent as opposed to simple coercion. In post-Gramscian theorization, for example, this dominant consensus is produced by a multifaceted interaction between the state in all its forms and ‘independent’ civil society.

The very term ‘civil society’ is itself problematic in political theory. Some readings in the 1990s saw civil society as an intermediate layer standing apart from, and independent of, the state, providing a transcendent element that could ensure democratization in societies undergoing transition, such as in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa. Many hoped that after the Belfast Agreement such a form of civil society could develop in Northern Ireland as a means of weakening communal and sectarian division.

The history of Provisionalism can be summarized as one of a long retreat from the highpoint of the early 1970s to the current pragmatic adaptation to the status quo. As the insurrectionary wave that had produced the Provisionals began to recede after 1974, they were forced to manoeuvre for nearly twenty years to avoid obvious military and political defeat. However, by the 1990s Republicans were eventually compelled to yield and through the peace process arrive at their current position of accommodation with the British state in Northern Ireland.

The chapters in Part I discuss the development of Provisional Republicanism as a political organization and a structure of power in the 1980s and 1990s. The central theme is an outline of the processes that transformed the Republican movement from an anti-state insurgency with claims to revolutionary leadership to a potential partner in governing the state it was pledged to destroy. Political sociologists have explained similar political transformations and incorporation as following an iron law of oligarchy. Theories of institutionalization explain how social movement organizations ‘become players in the conventional political process, thereby losing their initial character as challengers to the status quo and the forces in power.’ So powerful are these forces that it has been suggested that in the future, ‘contentious politics’ in capitalist societies might be domesticated and ‘institutionalized into ordinary politics, as were the strike and the demonstration in the nineteenth century.’