'If that is the case, it's a pity they asked so many people to go out and die for a united Ireland," said Anthony McIntyre as we discussed a recent book, The Provisional IRA, written by his fellow inmate, the former republican prisoner Tommy McKearney.
Brutally simplified, McKearney's conclusion was that the IRA succeeded in dismantling the "Orange state", the system built around unionist majority rule, and reforming Northern Ireland. This may be "the end of the journey", as he suggests, even though the terminus was not the socialist republic they originally intended.
McKearney dismisses dissident republicans as making a "fetish of the use of arms". He accuses them of having no policy "apart from repeating mantras about betrayal and the right of the Irish people". They are, he reckons, "doomed to obscurity".
McIntyre is a prime illustration of the waste involved in the IRA campaign. Witty, intelligent and with a high degree of self-knowledge, he gained a doctorate after leaving prison. He is an able man, determined and of strong character, and you can imagine him going far in many careers. He is also a former IRA commander, who spent long years in jail for the murder of two loyalists. That still hangs over him. For instance, he is unable to enter the US, though he has worked for Boston College as a researcher on its oral archive of Troubles participants. He describes McKearney as "a seasoned volunteer with considerable military and political experience".
In a concluding chapter, McKearney charts out his vision for a "New Republic and a Relevant Republicanism", urging republicans to work with the border and postpone its removal. "Partition matters," he writes, "but the urgency of its elimination is less important than the ability we now possess, impossible during the era of the Orange state, to develop crosssectarian, working-class solidarities while putting differences on the national question to one side."
He also says the once all-important "national question" was "defused" by the Good Friday agreement.
McIntyre, who broadly endorses McKearney's analysis, can be forgiven for wishing that someone had told him this a few years earlier. If the Provisional IRA had originally announced that its intention was to defuse the national question and democratise Northern Ireland, rather than remove the border, fewer people would have been prepared to kill and die for it. It is impossible to imagine 10 men starving themselves to death for power-sharing, equal opportunity and cross-border bodies.
There were clearly quicker ways to reach the IRA's final destination. Not only that, there are persuasive arguments that the IRA's terrorist campaign held back rather than hastened its achievements. The old Stormont, the embodiment of what McKearney calls the Orange state, fell after Bloody Sunday. Its removal preceded a period of heavy IRA recruitment and escalating violence. But the collapse wasn't primarily caused by IRA pressure. It occurred when the British state intervened to take security powers away from the unionist government in an attempt to stabilise the situation.
The IRA campaign peaked in that year of 1972. After that, it fought for the removal of British troops as a precursor to the ending of British rule. But it was obvious that the troops were there to contain the terrorist campaign and, as in fact happened, would leave once it was over. Attempts at reform on a similar scale to the Good Friday agreement were stymied by IRA violence, and the unionist extremism which it fed. The broad terms on which the conflict ended were rejected at earlier stages by the IRA. For most of its campaign it insisted on a British withdrawal, preferably within the lifetime of a parliament.
So although, as McKearney argues, the IRA did shape events to some extent, they were moulded by events to a far greater degree. It had to modify ideology to match what was feasible. McKearney quotes Marx as saying: "We develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles."
It doesn't have the same dialectical ring, but essentially Marx was urging the revolutionaries of 1843 to be flexible and not shut themselves off from reality.
In the end, the IRA did face reality and show flexibility, though a lot of blood was shed as it navigated a long learning curve. Some of its surviving early leaders, people who joined in the earliest days when its demands were highest, now sit in Stormont and in the Dail. Former bombers are members of the Northern Ireland policing board. These people bowed to necessity, wiped the blood from their hands, and accepted that their long journey through physical force brought them to a quite different destination than they had intended. It's undeniable that 30 years of death, imprisonment and suffering was not the shortest route to this outcome, but rather a tragic detour.
At the same time, though, the present compromise may be the softest possible landing and the best available terminus for the decades, even centuries, of violence which went before.
Similar struggles to that of physical force Irish republicanism resulted in total victory. One example is Crete, which endured centuries of guerrilla warfare against the Venetians and then the Turks. The Turkish occupation lasted 250 years.
"Freedom or Death" was the slogan of the Crete rebels, who had a Pádraig Pearselike ideology of blood sacrifice. Nikos Kazantzakis, a Cretan writer best known as the author of Zorba the Greek, twisted the slogan for the title of his novel to Freedom and Death.
About half of the population were Muslim. The Turkish pashas lived like the Anglo-Irish gentry. Ordinary Muslims and Christians found any attempt at accommodation stymied by a conflict sanctified by religious hatred.
One example from history, not fiction, is Crete's Arkadi monastery, a centre of the resistance during the uprising of 1866. It was packed with 325 men and 639 women and children when Gabriel Marinakis, the abbot and leader of the local resistance committee, decided it was preferable to sacrifice the population rather than accede to Turkish demands for surrender. All of the gunpowder and explosives in the monastery were gathered in a wine cellar and, as the Turks advanced in overwhelming force, the people retreated into the powder store. At the last moment, Konstantine Giaboudakis, a hero to this day, detonated the store. Some 864 Greeks and 1,500 Turks died in the battle and explosion.
Crete is pock-marked with such massacre sites, creating a blood debt which made compromise impossible. Turks who had lived in Crete for generations eventually left as part of an exchange of population and, like the Greeks who were shipped out of Turkey to replace them, often pined for their homeland. Greek families who had converted to Islam reverted to Christianity, and nobody mentions it now. One of the last Turkish villages was turned into a leper colony.
Upon consideration, our awkward compromise, in which nobody achieved quite what they initially wanted, does not seem so bad by comparison.
