So who won the war? Although this week's reduction of the British army garrison here to 5,000 troops is seen as marking the end of the war, no politician offered an opinion on who had actually won.
Their confusion is understandable – like some of the longest wars in history, by the time it ended, few were sure why it began.
The violence had its origins in unionist opposition to the non-sectarian civil rights movement of the 1960s.
It was opposed by successive unionist governments to preserve power and privilege. It was also confronted by Ian Paisley who, it is now clear, was seeking power and privilege.
The first violence came from the RUC and Paisley's supporters in opposition to Civil Rights Association (CRA) marches.
When this violence ultimately evolved into the anti-Catholic pogroms in Belfast in August 1969, the British army arrived on the streets.
The IRA supported the CRA.
It believed that the unionist government could be pressured into reform by a non-violent mass movement.
But the pogroms reactivated some old republicans who had been dormant since the 1940s. (Belfast, and indeed south Armagh, had played no part in the 1956-62 IRA campaign).
They dismissed the concept of reforming the state and opted instead for its destruction by forming their own 'Provisional' (temporary) IRA (PIRA).
History shows it was aptly named. It was a move that suited the British. By killing 13 civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1972, they cleared the CRA from the streets and redefined the problem here in terms of terrorism and tribal warfare.
The Provos eagerly embraced the new terms by blowing up Protestant businesses and calling it an economic war.
But Britain knew more about both economics and war and the ultimate outcome was the destruction not just of the PIRA's weapons but of the organisation itself. Without internment and the hunger strikes, victory would have been achieved much sooner.
Britain won, not so much by superior military might but through the use of high-level PIRA informers and collusion with loyalist paramilitaries.
They were helped by a changing Europe and an evolving Irish foreign policy. When the PIRA was formed in the autumn of 1969, the south was an independent state.
In 1973 it joined the European Union along with Britain – an event largely ignored by the economic warriors in the north.
Thus while the PIRA was seeking economic and political union with Dublin, Dublin was cementing economic and political union with Brussels, and through it, with London.
From then onwards the Provos could achieve Irish independence only by bombing the north out of the UK and the south out of Europe.
With the Irish border effectively gone, Britain established a Council of Ireland under the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement.
It offered joint north-south cooperation on everything from agriculture to trade and industry – plus a power-sharing assembly at Stormont. The Provos ignored it and Paisley set out to destroy it – 30 years later they both bought into that same proposal. The British had won the long war.
But while they were the overall winners, a special award must go to Paisley.
He helped to depose three Stormont prime ministers and a first minister, so that he could implement what he had called their sell-out policies.
The award for most inventive use of vocabulary goes to the PIRA.
Its war for an all-Ireland republic disintegrated into a demand for the right to administer part of Stormont.
This, they suggested, was worthy of victory celebrations in black taxis.
Other winners include a wide range of gangsters who made – and continue to make – vast fortunes from other people's misery.
It would all be funny if it were not so tragic. In effect the Troubles were not really a war.
They were an unnecessary and obscene sectarian bloodbath, often displaying excessive inhumanity and barbarity.
It was a shameful period in Irish and British history and it ended only when the main protagonists traded what they called principles for what Britain called power.
It is now the winners' prerogative to write history on their own terms. But who will write the history of those who lost? Some lost their lives; some lost loved ones. Others lost their limbs or their sight or their sanity. Our entire society lost its dignity.
What began as a struggle for civil rights was hijacked into a war to end British rule in Ireland. It ended in an argument over how British rule in Ireland should be administered. On that basis it is not difficult to conclude who won.
