Remembering Why War Was Waged

'The war for equality was victorious'

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" - Milan Kundera

Two decades on from that warm closing day of the August 1994 calendar when the Provisional IRA ceasefire was announced, it is hard to make any plausible claim that republicanism is twenty years on. It might even be argued that in the heady atmosphere back then there were signs in some republican quarters, albeit misplaced, of a greater optimism that a united Ireland might not just be too far off. Not much evidence of that type of sentiment today. Those either brave or foolhardy enough to vent it sound strained, as if they were predicting the resumption of the Latin mass, their ‘best before’ date expired.

Partition, which the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle was meant to eradicate, has survived the big cessation by twenty years and there is nothing on the horizon to suggest it will not continue to survive for the next fifty. In the zero sum battle between the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle and partition, there was one clear winner - partition.

That the armed struggle failed to even secure a draw in the form of joint sovereignty underscores the distance short of republican objectives the campaign pulled up. The post hoc rationalisation that seeks to depict the armed struggle as being successful has the unedifying quality of sounding like soccer players claiming they did not lose a match because they managed to score a few points over the bar.

Having forecast in writing, to much derision, the ceasefire some years earlier while still in prison I could hardly feign surprise or shock at its announcement. Nor was I in any doubt that the armed campaign was being wound up far short of its stated goals but considerably close to the professed objectives of its opponents in the British state. Nowhere was this more evident than in the politics of the consent principle. Having ideologically justified its armed campaign on the wholesale illegitimacy of the consent principle, the Provisional IRA was now being compelled to embrace the terms it warred against. The British state’s enduring alternative to republicanism, its long sought strategic objective, was finally colonising republican minds, and would ultimately produce mimic men as capable of criminalising physical force republicanism with the same shrillness as any Tory, Unionist or Fine Gael club member.

On the day of the announcement twenty years ago, I was much less concerned about the armed cessation than the pattern of politics that was moulding the emerging unarmed strategy. What has been termed “republican theology” was not shaping my view. I was a Provisional republican rather than a traditional one. Innately suspicious of the doctrinaire, I was not enamoured to the concept of purist positions, sensing that the quest to perfect rather than improve is often as dangerous as the blemish perfection portends to correct. While not a subscriber to the perpetual war camp, I retained an ability to discern in the ceasefire the erosion of the ideological raison d’etre underpinning the armed campaign that was now being ended.

From the perspective of advancing republicanism the ceasefire was an ethical rather than a strategic necessity, even if initiated for party political reasons rather than out of any moral consideration. The politics driving it were strikingly devoid of any strategic potential for developing republican struggle but were replete with indications, deliberately not spelt out, for discontinuing rather than continuing with the republican project, not just its armed dimension.

In my mind the buzz term of the period ‘new phase of struggle’ was a euphemism for strategic failure. Whatever the necessity for a ceasefire I was psychologically equipped to accept military defeat but not to celebrate the wider republican implosion it constituted. So, mindful of the December 1980 victory march at the end of the collapsed hunger strike I declined to make the short journey from Ballymurphy over to Connolly House, tersely commenting to a friend in the local Sinn Fein cumann that everybody can celebrate Christmas but not the turkeys.

Instead, in the company of Tommy Gorman I sauntered up to a resource centre at the top of the Whiterock Road, where he rang Bernadette McAliskey to congratulate her on her statement ‘the war is over and the good guys lost.’ Tommy was later “chastised” for his thought crime by the very man who the late Tony Catney alleged had castigated him as being treasonous for also being in possession of ideas not cleared by Thought Traffic Control.

Casting our minds back to 1994 it is not that difficult to imagine the outcry on the ground had it been revealed that after a long war among the dubious list of achievements would figure: Martin McGuinness serving as Peter Robinson’s deputy in Stormont, between them running the North administratively as part of the wider British state apparatus; that the same McGuinness would no longer be standing shoulder to shoulder with the people he previously ordered to conduct armed actions but would be screaming “traitors” at them for carrying out the killings he had not approved rather than those he had; that equality would mean middle class Catholics having the same right as middle class Protestants to prosecute republicans for their role in the Provisional IRA’s campaign and have them tried in no-jury Diplock Courts.

If that is a victory why did we ever fight a war in pursuit of a victory we always had?

This is the type of outcome that back in 1994 could only have been viewed as unmitigated defeat. We would have described the current arrangement as a little partitionist Bantustan subcontracted out to us so that we might, as loyal subjects to Her Majesty the Queen, help in its administration. That it can now be explained away as something else is not a measure of republican success but rather of how erstwhile republican activists have intellectually acquiesced in the logic of partition, learning to love what they once hated.

Given what we know today it is hardly going out on an intellectual limb in making the assertion that no volunteer who fought in the ranks of the Provisional IRA prior to the ceasefire of twenty years ago will live to see a united Ireland. But many more would undoubtedly have survived to have seen more than they ever did had their lives not been cut short by a war that produced nothing substantially different from the Sunningdale Agreement.

There is a sense that Martin McGuinness implicitly acknowledges some of this. Hence in public he pretends to have left the IRA in 1974, presumably unable to carry personal responsibility for his direction of an armed campaign for a further two decades that achieved so little beyond that date.

Occasionally we hear it said as some sort of rationale for the continuation of the war post-1974 that there was not one line about equality in the Sunningdale Agreement although lines aplenty in the Good Friday Agreement. Yet if we parse IRA and Sinn Fein statements explaining why the Sunningdale Agreement was the antithesis of republicanism there is no mention of equality being absent. Republicans did not oppose Sunningdale because it failed to stress equality for nationalists within the partitioned North. They rejected it because it failed to tackle the existence of the partitioned North; just as the GFA failed also to tackle partition, instead guaranteeing it for as long as a majority in the North want it to remain.

Of course none of this should be said. Under the regime of organised lying the President of Forgetting has outlawed the act of remembering. Memory too is seditious, a crime against the peace process.