Gerry Adams’s insistence that the Provisional IRA had been “law abiding” throughout its 25-year “armed struggle” will have struck many as implausible. Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt wasn’t alone in professing himself “stunned”. But Adams was simply spelling out what he and his IRA colleagues believed and continue to believe about their military campaign.

The question which arises is: with what law does Adams believe the Provisionals abided? In his interview on Radio Ulster on Monday, the Sinn Féin president went on to say: “The fact is that we didn’t have . . . a civic police service. We had to get that so that people could support it.” The reference to the law-abiding nature of the IRA can refer only to the contention which for a quarter of a century provided the organisation with supposed legal and therefore moral justification. This was that neither the London nor the Dublin government had any democratic legitimacy and that, therefore, there was no necessity to abide by laws enacted by either.

Reliable collection

The University of Ulster’s Cain archive, the most complete and reliable collection of documents relating to the Troubles, carries the text of the

Green Book

, setting out for recruits the ideology and requirements of IRA membership: “Commitment to the republican movement is the firm belief that . . . the army is the direct representative of the 1918 Dáil Éireann parliament, and that as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic, which has the moral right to pass laws for, and to claim jurisdiction over the territory . . . and all of its people regardless of creed or loyalty.”

The Green Book is now generally regarded as a blast from the dusty past, a quaint and eccentric irrelevancy which it is unhelpful to drag up in changed times. The point is, it was not regarded by republicans as quaint or eccentric during the relevant period, but as something approaching holy writ. Some at least of those who joined the IRA might not have done so had they not been equipped with a perspective depicting armed action as lawful and therefore, and more importantly, moral.

However this perspective is categorised now, its significance for the Troubles is a fact of history.

Rejection of the legitimacy of policing followed inevitably from rejection of the state. This is not the explanation suggested by Adams.

He says now that the problem lay in the fact – and it was a fact – that the RUC was far from a “civic police service” and needed drastic reform before citizens could be expected to accept and support it.

This was one of the key demands of the civil rights movement. No civil rights rally was complete without calls for reform and disarming the RUC and abolition of its associated militia, the B Specials, and pledges to “stay on the streets” until these objective were achieved.

The SDLP was dismissed by Adams and his associates as “the stoop down low party” for taking this line.

It may be that the policing reforms which have been achieved in the North would not have been won by the civil rights strategy of marches, boycotts, occupations of public buildings and so forth. This can only be a matter of speculation. But there’s nothing speculative about the facts set out above.

Sinn Féin leaders would be on firmer ground were they to acknowledge the political positions they’d held in the period of armed struggle and explain that they’d backed off from these positions upon realising the futility of continuing an armed campaign for “a united Ireland or nothing”. But to do this would be to admit that the struggle had turned out to have been fought under false colours.

Few of those who joined the IRA to win a united Ireland acted with evil intent. The young people who swarmed into the IRA in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday – to take the most striking example – were behaving in a rational way and at considerable risk to themselves.

Overthrow of the state

The idea that only through the overthrow of the state responsible for the massacre could meaningful change be brought about was not unreasonable.

There may have been other strategies based on other ideologies which would have better served the needs of the moment and avoided the pain associated with armed struggle, but that’s somewhat academic now.

What is not academic is that history is systematically being rewritten and misrepresented before our eyes without challenge from many mainstream commentators, perhaps because they know they would relentlessly be denounced as liars, frauds and enemies of the peace process, outriders of Brits, loyalists, zealots for law and order and other disreputable elements.

Most of us can do without that.