After the first IRA cessation, I wrote of the need for a thaw in the consciousness of this society, dulled and wearied by 25 years of slaughter. The eaves are now dripping. I was especially interested in recent contributions by two cabinet members: Justice Minister Michael McDowell in this newspaper on Saturday, and Environment Minister Dick Roche in yesterday's Sunday Independent.
Both ministers addressed the Provisionals' claim to a linear connection with the Sinn Féin founded a century ago by Arthur Griffith. Both denied that claim. Before, neither might have felt free to engage in such a discussion. The Provisionals' campaign had so contaminated the legacy of Griffith, Pearse and Collins that the tendency of public figures was either towards selective silence or a generalised disavowal of the historical project of independence. I believed such responses mistaken, because they delivered ownership of that project into the hands of those who sullied it.
I defended Sinn Féin frequently during the 1990s. I expressed, I believe, the perspective of a significant section of the Republic's population who had lived through the earlier part of the Troubles, holding, at the time and long afterwards, that the Provisionals' response was legitimate and unavoidable. As a teenager down west, I collected money after Bloody Sunday for the families of the dead. I believe now that the concepts of "snakin' regarderism" and "fellow traveller", frequently employed by those who sought from us all an unequivocal dissociation from the actions of the Provisionals, were only partly misplaced. I did not offer support to the Provisionals for their indiscriminate slaughter of innocent bystanders, but I can see why some saw this as a semantic evasion.
Although the historical narrative traced by Michael McDowell and Dick Roche is important, the basis of the Provos' support in the Republic was always rooted more in emotion than fact. The grievance of Northern nationalists resonated with residual sentiment in some parts of the Republic, grounded in collective memories of the abuses perpetrated here by the former occupier.
Many of us who offered succour to the Provos, in whatever degree, believed not so much that the actions of the IRA were legitimate but that, since this was how many Northern nationalists saw it, we, not being in their shoes, could not rush to condemnation. We wished and prayed it would stop, but could not go further without distancing ourselves from our own history and leaving Northern nationalists isolated and more desperate than before. This resulted in what Eoghan Harris called "the leaky national consensus" in which support for the Provos waned after an atrocity and grew again as the memory receded.
But the leak has been effectively welded by a succession of events with no justification in the context of the alleged "war": the Belfast bank heist, the Colombia Three, the McCabe affair and, by no means least, the episode in which the wife of a Sinn Féin TD participated in a public brawl in which gardaí were assaulted and threatened with the consequences, by virtue of this woman's connections, of applying the law her husband has pledged to defend.
I have touched before on what I called "talking the Provos down from the ledge", by which I meant the need to convince the extremists that they would not lack support if they laid down their guns. If the killing could be stopped by bringing "our" side in from the cold, then surely it was better that we offer them solidarity if they stepped back from the brink and handed over their hostages?
But as time goes on, I agree more with those who told us that the Provisionals were incorrigible thugs who sought one thing only: power at the point of a gun. Michael McDowell now describes the Provos as "classical Marxists", but this may be to mistake the mask for the face. He may have been closer to the truth when he called them thugs. The IRA "struggle" bears the classic hallmarks of terrorist psychology: a deep sense of grievance which translates into a desire to hurt and keep on hurting, not just those who have wronged you but even those who, by living ordinary lives, seem to suggest that your grievance does not matter.
For all their alleged political sophistication, the Provos have not shaken off this founding neurosis. It becomes clearer that they were never Marxists, never republicans, and, as we observed in their attitude to Articles 2 and 3, never nationalists in any sense connected to concepts of unity understood in this Republic. They never had any concept as to how Ireland might be reunified, and probably no such ambition other than as a rhetorical instrument.
You might say that they were purely a "Brits Out" movement, except that they have clearly been willing to accept a settlement without getting the Brits, as it were, out. Always, they have been willing to concede anything except their own grievance, their "right" to avenge it, and the overall meaning this holds for them.