I cannot help wondering what is likely to be history's verdict on the events of the past 40 years in Northern Ireland, and on the performance of the various actors in those events, namely successive British and Irish governments, and the political representatives of the two parts of the community in Northern Ireland, writes Garret Fitzgerald.
So far as the first half-century of the existence of Northern Ireland is concerned, I doubt if any of the players will emerge unscathed. Unionist governments allowed their fears of what was then a 35 per cent nationalist minority, and of what they perceived as a hostile Irish state to the south, to distort their domestic policymaking in a way that decisively alienated that minority. And the nationalists largely opted out of participation in the new polity.
From the outset, successive sovereign British governments abandoned their responsibilities, which eventually led to an explosion of violence. Meanwhile, successive Irish governments, especially from the late 1940s onwards, were actually heightening tensions within the North, through their provocative anti-partition propaganda.
When that explosion finally came, the Irish government was totally unprepared, and deeply divided, but in the difficult years from 1969 to 1973 the wise advice of Ken Whitaker, then governor of the Central Bank, helped Jack Lynch to steer a steady course through dangerous uncharted waters.
We now know that, for its part, the British government of the late 1960s was somewhat better prepared for the crisis.
But once the British army had been deployed to replace the RUC in many areas, the priority that the British gave to protecting army morale soon began to undermine any constructive attempts to tackle the grievances of the minority, and progressively boosted support for the IRA within the nationalist community.
It took several decades of persistent Irish diplomacy to overcome gradually the obstacle that an ill-judged and incoherent British policy posed to the restoration of peace in the North.
What of the IRA? Leaving aside entirely the issue of the morality of its campaign of violence, and judging that campaign solely in terms of its stated objective - namely securing British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and promoting Irish political unification - its campaign has to be judged to have been a total failure.
Future historians will, I think, see their persistence for several decades with this armed campaign as having had only two important long-term consequences, neither of which can give any satisfaction to either the IRA or Sinn Féin.
First of all, historians will, I believe, see the IRA campaign as having had a profoundly negative impact upon the economy of Northern Ireland, making any possibility of Irish political unity much more remote.
It should be recalled that in the 1960s, before the violence began, the economies of both parts of our island were growing at about 4 per cent a year, in marked contrast with the contemporary British growth rate of less than 2.5 per cent.
That situation led me to point out in my 1972 book, Towards A New Ireland, that if such a ratio between Irish and British growth rates were to continue, the economic gap between both parts of Ireland and Britain would be bridged within about a quarter of a century.
In fact the gap between the output level of our State and that of Britain was virtually bridged over the following 30 years, but there has been very little narrowing of the similar gap between Northern Ireland and Britain during that period.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a major part of the reason Northern Ireland's growth rate decelerated from 1970 onwards - while ours eventually accelerated - was that thereafter economic activity in Northern Ireland was persistently held back by the IRA's campaign of violence, which hugely discouraged investment in the area.
The consequent continuing massive dependence of Northern Ireland on transfers from Britain poses a huge economic obstacle to political reunification, even if the political obstacles to such a development were, in time, to disappear.
For the people of Northern Ireland could simply not afford to lose the transfers from Britain that enable them to enjoy living standards more than one-quarter higher than their own output justifies.
And the Irish State, with only one-fifteenth of Britain's population and revenue, could not replace these transfers without imposing upon its own people a level of taxation that they would simply not be prepared to contemplate.
The IRA campaign thus pushed any possibility of Irish unity into a more distant future.
The other long-term consequence of the IRA campaign which Sinn Féin certainly did not foresee and can scarcely welcome is the manner in which the joint interest of the two governments, and of their peoples in tackling the IRA threat, came eventually to transform radically what had historically always been a difficult bilateral relationship between Ireland and Britain.
How did this come about?
On the Irish side the arms crisis of 1970, followed by the riots that led to the burning of the British embassy in 1972, rapidly forced Irish politicians, as well as informed Irish opinion, to abandon past counterproductive "gesture" politics about partition, and instead to identify the supreme interest of the Irish State as the restoration of peace and stability in Northern Ireland, on the basis of any future unification of the island being conditional on the assent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.
Simultaneously, with the demise of the cold war having finally eliminated any strategic British interest in Northern Ireland, Britain's primary concern was now also the restoration of peace and stability in the North.
During the 1980s, and even more so in the 1990s, this new identity of interest of the two states in relation to Northern Ireland came to transcend all other differences, and has since led to the emergence of a closer relationship between them than exists between neighbouring states elsewhere in Europe - and this in turn has been increasingly reflected at the popular level.
So, in addition to intensifying unionist political opposition to Irish unity and preserving Northern Ireland's heavy economic dependence on Britain, thus prejudicing the possibility of eventual Irish political unity, the IRA campaign eventually came to precipitate a positive transformation of what had previously been a somewhat tetchy Irish-British relationship.
Neither of these was what the IRA set out to achieve. Thus, in its own terms the IRA was a total failure. That, I am afraid, is likely to be the harsh verdict of history on the futile violence of the Provisional IRA over a quarter of a century.