Strategically, the greatest shift for the Nationalist movement was the resignation of Gerry Fitt from the leadership of the SDLP in 1979. The emergence of John Hume as the new leader, with the high esteem that he was held in from his civil rights days, was to shift formalised Republican politics back to the larger issues, rather than concentrating on internal settlement between the two communities. Hume’s role was clear. He was to engage the state at all levels, legally, and attempt to internationalise the ‘Troubles’ so as to force a review of official British policy that sought to portray the ‘Troubles’ in terms of intercine tribal rivalry.1 At the core of this was the push to increase the role of both London and Dublin in further rapproachment between the state and Republican community which was to become the lynchpin of the formation of the Forum of New Ireland on May 30 1983 (Aughey 1996: 79-80).

What Hume was attempting was more importantly a rapproachment with Sinn Féin and the IRA. Relations had been strained over issues of party participation, the Hunger Strikes, and the open fight for the Catholic vote since the decline of the NICRA as a political factor (Aughey 1996: 80). The plan was to form one Republican block, with the SDLP as the moderate voice at its head, which would clearly mark the divide politically between the pre-NICRA and post-NICRA political landscape (Arthur 1996: 67). The problem was that the IRA itself viewed this as a negating of their political influence through denying them the one tool that gave them significant power: that of their ability to strike at the state through direct military means on behalf of the militant Republican community. Yet, the successful formation of a Nationalist block would have the effect of squeezing the Unionist out of the equation. Already the SDLP’s candidate’s withdrawal from the April 9 1981 Fermanagh-South by-election had allowed Bobby Sand’s, Hunger Striker, to win a seat in Parliament (Adams 1996: 292; Bairner 1996: 163; Taylor 1997: 240).

The Anglo-Irish Agreement: The Modification of IRA Strategy, or the Consolidation of a New Ideology?

Adams by 1981 had realised the importance of forming broad united fronts to ensure the demands made by the Hunger Strikers were met (van der Wusten 1988: 193). Central to this was ensuring that the movement would be less elitist and enter the political arena along the lines of the NICRA’s elite’s transition into the SDLP (Hedges 1988: 110). The shift in strategy towards a more conciliatory platform would emerge concurrently with the processes that would lead to the Anglo-Irish Agreement’s re-emphasis of the significance of communal rights to any future resolution of the crisis and power sharing arrangements (Dunn & Morgan 1994: 9; Farren 1995: 4). This was a redefinition of relations between Sinn Féin and the SDLP, as the UDA and RUC were themselves forging a new axis with the British Army.

Adams and McGuinness seemingly recognised that Sinn Féin had won even more electoral support from peace talks than they ever did in times of increased terrorist action (Boyce 1991: 369). For Sinn Féin, electoral participation gave them an avenue to test their public legitimacy in the wake of the ‘Hunger Strike’ campaigns of 1980-81 (Coogan 1996: 282-283; Taylor 1997: 382-383), in order to ensure that the SDLP’s moderate line would not dominate fully the Republican movement’s formalised political platform (Aughey 1996: 78). Especially, considering that much of the split in the NICRA between the SDLP and Sinn Féin occurred over the abstentionist debate (Hedges 1988: 104). Yet, it would also be a mistake to believe that lines of communication between the two groups were non-existent. They were after all, united in their desire to dismantle Ulster.

Whenever Fitzgerald and Hume denounce the IRA, this is the most consumate humbug, but it is politically necessary humbug and the IRA understands this political necessity and does not get upset about it (Roberts 1986: 26).

The legitimation of the Irish national angle, in terms of the 1985 endorsement by 473 to 47 votes in the House of Commons of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, through the acceptance of the central role of Dublin in any future negotiation was to grant significant approval to this new strategy (Roberts 1986: 12). Hume had successfully placed the national agenda at the centre of any future resolution between the movement and the state, thus giving an olive branch of sorts to Sinn Féin:

...with the Anglo-Irish Agreement under his belt, Mr Hume was talking about the need to “transcend” that Agreement. The Agreement itself has been rejected (formally) by Sinn Féin, but an attempt to “transcend” it, by further movement down the nationalist agenda, might be the basis for a common front of all nationalists (O’Brien 1994: 177).

Once again the debate in the Republican camp was to be over direction and strategy. The 1980s were to be a watershed which was to see a re-emergence of the debate between constitutionalism, which even Sinn Féin contemplated, and the role of nationalism in movement mobilisation for a newly almost completely formalised electoral entity as the SDLP proffered (Banton 1986: 18). The IRA themselves were realising that in some sections of the movement the strategy of VDA was now becoming equated with the very identity of the movement itself (Dunn & Hennessey 1996: 183). In turn, marginalising the IRA when issues of social, cultural and formalised political concern were being debated. Strategically, the need for a broader based national movement similar to the ANC of South Africa was becoming evident if the IRA wished to continue to compete successfully with the SDLP for the nationalist community’s sympathies (Coogan 1995: xix). As Paddy Molloy of Sinn Féin explained to Hedges (1988: 110):

there is still an element of people who want a unified Ireland and that’s it, so we have to say to ourselves the Republican movement is a broad-based movement and it will have to take in, by necessity, as many people as possible... like the ANC in South Africa.

From 1981 onward, the nature of the violence was changing. VDA as a strategy of protest became ever more calculated, and succinctly correlated with electoral platforms and periods of intrinsic negotiation between both Republican competitors and Loyalist foes (Patterson 1997: 209-220). The IRA High Command soon realised that “the electoral success of the campaign of violence could be enhanced through the participation in elections of Sinn Féin, the movement’s political wing (Guelke 1995: 124). The progressive move towards formalisation was still counter weighed by the IRA’s military capabilities and their ability to tune in on Republican discontent with the lack of will of the SDLP to engage the state in any way outside official channels (Lee 1995: 454-457).

Sinn Féin was able to consolidate their vote from 10.1% of first preference votes in the October 1982 Northern Irish Assembly elections, to 13.4% at the June 1983 UK general election, during the SDLP’s initial negotiations with London that eventually became the impetus behind the Anglo-Irish Agreement (Coogan 1995: 502-512; Guelke 1995: 24). The SDLP’s great problem was its inability to confront the reality of those ghettoised communities for whom constitutionalism resolved little when the Security Forces were still willing to resort to extra-parliamentary and unconstitutional methods in their fight against terrorism. A point, according to Maguire (1996b: 12), Sinn Féin has fully recognised:

Sinn Féin has not become a reformist party because the British state has not taken up the risk of engaging it directly in a process that would lead it into the parliamentary arena. This also makes it difficult for Sinn Féin to enter the politics of electoralism as it always encounters difficult political opportunity for advancing its cause.

The very fact that Section 14 of the Prevention of Terrorist Act, whereby the Security Forces were reserved the right to detain any person without a warrant, on suspicion of belonging to an illegal organisation or movement, was applied solely when dealing with Northern Irish security issues, was a major civil rights issue. This led the Republican community to view such policing as being designed to oppress Irish nationalism specifically, as well as to reassure the Protestant of the maintenance of their hegemony (Coogan 1995: 517). Especially, when Welsh arsonists, Scottish nationalists, and animal rights activists did not come under this act (Dickson 1995: 66-67).

The more recent attempts to defeat terrorism by relying on uncorroborated evidence from a series of ‘supergrasses’, and by an apparent ‘shoot-to-kill’ strategy on the past of undercover police and Army units, have likewise achieved only short-term successes and caused further damage to communal confidence in the administration of justice (Hadden & Boyle 1988: 56).

What was developing could be interpreted as a tacit recognition by the British Government that a reassessment of the nature of nationalist elite exclusion of the Ulster state was needed. The fact that Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Irish Labour Party were now ready to recognise the right of the Ulster community to exist in their own terms, also signified the realisation that civil and human rights could not be addressed until communal and national rights were secured for all sides (Hussey 1994: 193). A point emphasised throughout the 1984 Report of the New Ireland Forum on the New Ireland Forum. At this stage the IRA were not fully convinced of the validity of power sharing with a community that had overwhelmingly rejected it back in 1975.

The decision, hence, at the November 1984 Chequers Summit between Thatcher and Taoiseach Dr Fitzgerald, 2 to recognise the role of national sovereignty was seen more as a change in tactics from a London Government sick of the high costs of maintaining troops in Northern Ireland rather than a redress of the Ulster elite’s inherent right to rule (Hadden & Boyle 1988: 62-63; Fitzgerald 1991: 566). Northern Ireland was heading to a federal solution. Yet, the subsequent street marches and civic disobedience, led by the Protestant Loyalist community, and supported eventually by the IRA, on the anniversary of the Hillsborough Agreement, would show that the resolution through the established political process was not always acceptable to communities schooled in venting their discontent via other methods (Arthur 1988: 73; Coogan 1996: 217).

Hillsborough and the Formalisation of Republican Demands within an Official British Framework.

The Hillsborough Agreement of 15 November 1985 was the 6th Summit in the Anglo-Irish process that began in May 1980, and much of the problems in its implementation was seen to be in the policy makers definitions of the protagonists (Arthur 1988: 66). Both sides had tended to talk from non-negotiable fixed positions. Correspondingly, the parallel development of competing identities would create space outside the system, similar to Melucci’s (1992b) notion of conflict creating alternative spaces within pre-existing social cleavages, whereby new strategies would be implemented according to the pace of reform being instigated from the centre. The IRA had to now face the facts that the nature of their own response to state hegemonisation had created an opposite state ‘mimicking’ of the movement that would forge an equally stoic national movement entity at the centre of the state they opposed (Adams 1995: 193-197). What Hillsborough had achieved was a recognition of the right of Ulster to exist as territorial representation of Protestant concerns (Taylor 1997: 285).

In fact, the problem with the constitutional nationalist path, embodied in the Hillsborough Agreement of 1985, was its contradictory nature, since it recognised the right of the state not merely to dictate the terms of engagement, but also the pace of reform (Boyce 1990: 44). Tilly’s (1993b) example of the national movement being but a response to such state dictates is further bourn out here, as the SDLP realised that violence was in fact entrenching the cycle and leading further away from any resolution (Murray 1995: 226; Aughey 1996: 74). This was due to the inability of the state to deal with violence as a means of expressing peripheral discontent. It was an oversimplification of policy that would negate the role of more moderate alternatives, thus entrenching anti-state feelings amongst many Republicans:

I mean there were two ways of dealing with the violence either it was suppressed by force if you like, by the strength of security measures or the people who were using the violence were persuaded to stop using it. The force didn’t work and didn’t seem to be working. The second has worked , people didn’t believe that it would when it was embarked upon but it did and so I think that party’s role stems from its decision to try and end the violence by direct engagement with those who are using violence on the Nationalist side in particular. 3

From a Protestant perspective, this curtailing of their power to formulate policy directly, through being directly represented by London, has shifted the political centre which in turn has led to a new peripheralisation (Dunn & Morgan 1994: 11). This has commonly become known as ‘Protestant alienation’ and has been dealt with quite succinctly in the literature by Clayton (1996), Morrow (1995), Dunn and Morgan (1994). More importantly, it allows for the legitimation of Protestant extremism (Hadden & Boyle 1989: 18). Due to the fact that if the Protestants can be portrayed as alienated, then the Ulster state can be seen as equally anti-Protestant. This is difficult to accept for many Nationalists who have yet to be convinced that Protestant paramilitaries are autonomous of the British Security Forces.

The IRA now realised that within the very cycles of protest that had defined the intensification of the ‘Troubles’, the British Government was also using their inability to curtail Protestant extremism to justify their maintenance of all security issues (Adams 1986: 64; Clayton 1996: 96). The British Government wanted resolution, but as things stood it would come at the expense of an ‘All-Ireland’ solution. The state had successfully, through the political opportunity structures formed in the Anglo-Irish process, enfranchised the moderate Nationalists and all Unionists, whilst excluding the Provisional IRA (Fitzgerald 1991: 492; Hussey 1994: 193). This would force the Provisionals into action.

This was a period of centre-periphery reformulation that would benefit the SDLP greatly, as the SDLP would also directly benefit from both VDA and NVDA initiated by the IRA, thus enhancing the SDLP’s position as the middle ground between state and movement (Mallie & McKittrick 1997: 37-43). It was during the ‘Hunger Strikes’ that the SDLP had gained 17.5% of the vote, and progressively up to 17.8% during the formalisation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 (Arthur 1996). Their highest results, with peaks of 21% and 22% in 1989 and 1993 respectively, were posted when cycles of protest and IRA activity were in decline (Coogan 1996: 506).

It was Sinn Féin that, seemingly, realised that much of the social cleavages felt in the province were the result of elite ethnic pressures, rather than external class pressures. In such circumstances, the class driven rhetoric of the SDLP was irrelevant.4 Socialism was viewed as an anti-rural doctrine, but socialism driven by the nationalist goal was a form of revolutionary strategy that the rural periphery could comprehend. Thus, when Seamus Mallon, the SDLP candidate won traditionally nationalist Fermanagh, on a platform of aggressive nationalism, both Sinn Féin and SDLP strategists alike realised the necessity of finding a middle ground that was less revolutionary, yet, strongly nationalist in principle (Hedges 1988: 107).

Whatever the environmental conditions placed upon groups such as the IRA, they operated as representatives of a nationalist movement, unified in an ideology based on nationalist resistance to a perceived imperialist state entity; in this way the strategy is a ‘mimicking’ of state institutions of repression designed to counter the state’s own strategies of elite consolidation. The problem faced by the IRA was how to hold together a nationalist tradition and contemporary social conditions, without alienating those who find the national issue confronting. Sinn Féin realising this, published in May 1987 a discussion paper entitled A Scenario for Peace which was to redefine the role of the Provisional IRA. They nevertheless maintained a right of reply to any increase in overt policing against their constituency by the Security Forces (Guelke 1995: 125). VDA was seen as a right of reply for a community that held little redress within the established legal system.

In fact, the IRA were to call upon the need for the establishment of communal policing, as a major buffer to the vociferous policing strategies of the British Security Forces (Mallie & McKittrick 1997: 81-82). This is similar to what ETA was doing in the mid-1980s when the democratisation processes in Spain were complete. Yet, the IRA had still fallen into the greatest trap offered by the cycle of action-reaction-action, that which della Porta and Rucht (1995) note as the identification of the movement with their action, rather than their core ideology. This is embodied in the stratification of the conflict which I believe occurs with the failure of the movement to gain control over the protest cycle through ‘mimicking’ the state (Murray 1995: 226).

Social protest was interlinked to terrorism, as a response to state oppression with nationalist aspiration and the social liberation, as shown in Tilly’s (1975 1993b) paradigm of the dynamic nature of movement-state cyclical inter-development. This fostered an environment of acceptance of both the need for VDA, as a last resort, as well as legitimation of the SDLP’s move towards opening channels with London through democratisation of the movement, as well as the Northern Irish state (Dunn & Morgan 1994). More importantly, it forced Hume to recognise the legitimacy of Sinn Féin’s claim of being a significant voice within the Republican movement, and perhaps tacitly recognising the role of VDA in bringing the British to the table (Sinn Féin 1988: 197-198, 1994b). In fact there is even a hint that the IRA have intimated to the SDLP their willingness to embrace, a political solution as long as they are given a position of prominence within the entire peace process:

Since the Hume-Adams talks that hostility has declined and there is now I think a disposition within both parties to try to examine ways in which we might cooperate and at least to reduce the bitterness of the hostility between us.5

In a bid to achieve a pan-Irish political unity, the SDLP was forced to embrace more overtly nationalist causes. This would prevent the SDLP from being further isolated from the radical urban Catholic vote (Guelke 1995: 130). Yet, it is still their ability to utilise these state sponsored political opportunity structures within the electoral system that allows the SDLP to exploit a decline in public sympathy with the gunmen (Weitzer 1988:230). The IRA though had to renege on armed insurrection as a means to negotiation (Coogan 1996: 396). If this was to occur, it would bring into question the one physical strategy of protest that could guarantee them autonomy of action and defence against state reactionism (Sinn Féin 1994a). A position that would bring about a similar defencelessness as occurred at Sunningdale’s decline in 1975 (Kyle 1995). The merging from the mid-1970s of an anti-imperialist struggle with the military and political wings of IRA revolutionary socialism, was to further alienate a war weary Nationalist community that were beginning to question issues of abstentionism and outright rebellion (Hedges 1988: 110).

Weitzer (1988: 230) notes that there is a decline in the percentage of the Republican vote that Sinn Féin has accrued between 1983 and 1987 from 43% to 35% due to the dissatisfaction with their strategies of engaging the state in VDA. Yet, I would disagree with Weitzer’s analysis that the decline was due to the Republican community’s general frustration with the inability of the IRA’s VDA to achieve reform. What I believe has occurred, in periods of electoral decline, has been the correlation between a decline in effective activity and corresponding declines in IRA support. For many in the community the IRA’s role is specific, and if they are not seen to fulfil this then they are negated from the equation.

By the late 1980s the social disadvantage of being Catholic within Northern Irish society and government was still a prominent enough an issue as in the mid-1960s for activists frustrated with the rate of reform to exclude any notion of joint rule (McCullogh 1984: 122; Gallagher 1995: 7-46; Knox & Hughes 1995: 51; Smith 1995: 177). Within the local councils some 66.2% of employees were Protestant and 33.8% Catholic; with 75.1% of managers Protestant and 24.9% Catholic; whilst, more importantly, in the middle bureaucracy 81.6% was Protestant and 18.4% Catholic (Knox & Hughes 1995: 51).

Facing a political reality of inherent disadvantage, the SDLP recognised that community empowerment cannot occur from above but must occur through grassroots activism. This has allowed the SDLP to seek reconciliation with Sinn Féin at the council level in order to redress issues of social welfare and inner urban decay (Knox & Hughes 1995: 51). Whether this is a sign of a general move towards the formalisation of a national front is hard to tell. I feel this is due to an overall strategic move towards pooling of common resources, ie, national sentiment, in a bid to unite the national movement into a more fluid coalition of interests that could justify the expansion of repertoire in times of political lull in the cycle. After all even members of the SDLP are not adverse in expressing their mistrust in the ability of the British state structure to absorb the competing demands of two diametrically opposed ideological movements.

Every time there has been a big breakthrough whether it is the Downing Street Declaration, the Framework Agreement or the Communique the British Government has always tactically up to that moment said “no deal, big problems to overcome” and then very often at the last tactical moment they say “right, we got agreement”. So times to decode the British whether it is a tactical matter or whether it is actually a policy matter is very difficult.6

The SDLP recognised that they had failed to gain support from the arch conservative rural communities with the IRA still receiving the majority of their mobilisational base from Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh, whilst holding significant influence in Derry and West Belfast (Hedges 1988: 105). It was the nationalist doctrine that enabled the IRA to focus on the nation-state as the end political goal. Suggesting that the way to liberate the Nationalists from the Ulster state was through the attainment of statehood by the movement. As Eugene Kelly, a SDLP member for Fermanagh stated on the move back to nationalism in Hedges (1988: 106), it was:

a reactionary political choice... the reaction of people living in the rural areas is that it’s the only way we show our opposition to Unionism... and the dominance Unionism had in a county where there was always a nationalist majority.

This suggests that the state still remains significant, not just as a fulcrum to mobilisation, but also as the predeterminer of the nature of movement formation. For both the IRA and SDLP, each reaction of the state remained to be ‘mimicked’, and only through parodying the state could they reassert their position that was constantly changing according to the new political opportunity structures offered the periphery. The cycle seemed endless, and the nature of the conflict had solidified Protestant extremism (Banton 1986: 21; Morrow 1995: 161). Each move by Thatcher would lead to an extension of the violence to the effect that by the late 1980s, the processes that were derivative of the Hillsborough process could be said to have identified a place for the legitimation of radical Loyalist claims (Ignatieff 1993: 166). The IRA as an alternative ideological movement of state had increased the role of the state as mediator with each new targeting of it during lulls in the protest cycle.

Hamilton, Moore and Trimble (1995: 57) note that this occurred through the way VDA was able to create a place for the IRA within more formalised structures of state as a symbol of resistance. Just by openly belonging to the movement is, in itself, a sign of political opposition to the force that the movement is sworn to dismantle, which is the state (Cairns 1994: 5; Cairns & Cairns 1995: 105). This is why the mythology of the significance of the Roman Catholic Church to Irish nationalism is simply that, a myth. The contemporary nature of the ‘Troubles’ has brought a more sophisticated community which sees more pageantry and effective protest in the secular (Murray 1982; Doherty & Poole 1995). This is why the slogan “Beware a Risen People” in West Belfast is so thought provoking, as well as powerful a tool of social mobilisation, as it relates more to thoughts of every day life than notions and rituals of the Church (Hamilton 1995: 95).

Ideologically, religion is important only in its ability to define socio-economic class as there is evidence, as purported by Morrow (1995: 151), that most terrorists do not place religious doctrine central to their political aims and strategies of protest. Nationalism hence, has become the doctrine of movement consolidation. As such state nationalism is the mobilisation raison d’être as it not only defines the anti-Ulster activist into a definable collective whole. It offers, rather, a solution that can outride cycles of increased and decreased political activism to eventually claim political autonomy. Nationalism, doctrinally speaking, relies on this agency to act as a point of departure for future anti-centralist activism. As Joe Austin points out:

I think that nationalism in its definition and certainly in the Irish sense is not an aggressive force by and large, and there are exceptions to this, but by in large its been a progressive force and nationalism from a Sinn Féin point of view, nationalism or socialism I think are the two sides of the one coin it doesn’t really matter if you got national independence and behaved in the same way as we behave now it would have no effect but it you had national sovereignty and use it in a productive fashion I think it certainly can bring about a better way of life and a change of life.7

The IRA, however, has fallen into the trap of slipping into a permanent militancy that only further justifies the centre’s intransigence towards including these radicals into the state run processes of conflict resolution. What sustained Sinn Féin throughout the lean periods of the 1980s was the responsiveness of the Republican community to each step by Sinn Féin at embracing varying tactics that were non-violent in origin, the threat of the British Government to alienate them from any of the peace initiatives also helped (Coogan 1995: 609). The peak support attained by Sinn Féin came with their initial foray into the electoral system during the ‘Hunger Strikes’ when they accrued 10% of the total vote (Taylor 1997: 282).

Yet, with each push towards reconciliation, the Republican voters tended to show solidarity with the militant wing of the national movement. After the February 1996 Dockland Bombings were to signal an end of the cease fire, when anti-IRA feeling was most prominent in Britain some 15.47% of electors voting for Sinn Féin during the May 1996 round table talks (Coogan 1996: 505; Arthur 1996: 72; Mallie & McKitrick 1997: 402). This suggested that Catholic Republicans could not tolerate any solution that espoused the continued existence of an Ulster state because the cycles of continuous centre-periphery inter-dependent development had ensured the formation of a movement identity in exact opposition to that of the centre’s identity. This would lead to a stratification of the conflict that is bourn out in the successful election results (Mallie & McKittrick 1997: 402-403). A high was eventually reached of 17% at the May 1 1997 general elections, during New Labour’s landslide victory, which significantly saw Martin McGuinness, for the first time in thirty years, wrest Mid-Ulster away from the DUP (Taylor 1997: 313).

The Mid-Ulster vote was a significant success for the IRA’s policy of a continued use of VDA as a last resort. Though predominantly Catholic, this electorate had remained significantly in the hands of the extremist DUP since Stormont’s collapse due to the inability of the the SDLP and Sinn Féin to concur on the nature of the resistance (Coogan 1996: 505). This had allowed for the DUP to hold the seat through exploiting the disunity amongst the Nationalist community. In fact, since Denis Haughey, John Hume’s European Assistant and prominent NICRA activist, was the main Republican candidate, it was presumed in an environment whereby the majority of the Catholic community seemingly desired resolution that the old peace activists would win out. To the surprise of SDLP strategists, and the Unionist Electoral Council, Martin McGuinness would win (Adams 1997).

This was a stinging rebuke for the SDLP’s appeasement of Unionist concerns, as McGuinness has been commonly acknowledged as the link between the IRA and Sinn Féin, and for three years had been integral as the direct representative of the Army Council in private talks with the Major Government and Sir Patrick Mayhew the Secretary for Northern Ireland (Taylor 1997: 329-333). It was a sign that the national question was far from resolved and the IRA far from a spent social movement force in the eyes of the community they represented (Sinn Féin 1994a: 22-25).

Where the movement activities of the SDLP and Sinn Féin were most effective were in their ability to highlight the discrepancies between the written law and human rights abuse within the Northern Irish state; and how that could be looked upon as the catalyst of the modern ‘Troubles’. As a result, the Opsahl Commission (1993) was set up by the British, Irish and US Governments, under the chair of a leading Norwegian human rights activist Professor Torkel Opsahl. By June 1993, after reviewing some 500 submissions, he concluded that if Unionists refused to accept direct executive rule from Dublin then they should allow the Catholic community an equal voice in legislating laws and policies, as well as a veto on the ratification of administrative structures (Opsahl 1993: 40; Boyle & Hadden 1994: 127). This placed the onus back on the state. One that would counter the British Government’s attempts to portray the Protestant Community as equally aggrieved within the post Stormont Ulster state structure (Clayton 1996).

For the first time since 1922, the place of Ulster within the Union had been questioned by the British themselves within the Anglo-Irish Agreement (Dunn & Morgan 1988: 72). The very acceptance of a role for the Irish in the future development of the statelet, was a signal that the extremism of the Ulster Unionist doctrine of Britishness was one that was not on par with modern mainland Britain (Mallie & McKittrick 1997: 139). The settler society notion of identification with the metropole, through positioning themselves as the last bastion of Crown and Empire, was antiquated in a society heading for greater European integration.

It would, however, be wrong to believe the notion of Protestant Loyalism is no longer a part of the discourse. What has changed is that this Loyalism is now conditional on the ability of the state to maintain Protestant hegemony (Clayton 1996: 129; Hennessey 1995). In the long term, this can only recreate the cycle of action-reaction-action as it points to the need of the state to use the same populist strategies of the peripheral movement in order to re-legitimise the centre’s role in the continued existence of the state (Taylor 1984: 64). Central to this new Ulster identity is the ability to portray the state as an anti-thesis to the radical Irish Republican alternative. This has led to reciprocal ‘mimicking’ by the IRA of each intensification of Protestant militantism.

The fact that some 75 people have been killed by on-duty members of the Security Forces between 1982 and 1992, whilst only four soldiers have been convicted for murder, suggest that the state does much to cover up ‘extreme’ policing as a natural consequence of the protection of state security (Dickson 1995: 67). Correspondingly, the UUP, as the one elite that holds control over a majority of local boroughs and councils, has been able to portray itself before the British Government as the mediator between two radical competing ideological movements. The result has been the re-emergence of the Ulster state as integral to any future resolution of the conflict as the entity that can best guarantee Protestant rights in any future All-Ireland framework, in which the current elite would become a minority.

The Republican community, as a result of twenty five years of direct confrontation with the centre, were now even further away from the state ideologically than they were at the commencement of the cycle (O’Malley 1983; McKeown 1989; Mallie & McKittrick 1997). The paradox of this type of movement activism was that it hinged upon the backing of a given community, thus excluding the other (McLaughlin 1993: 97). No matter what direction taken, any reform of the Ulster state still held Protestant hegemonism and Catholic exclusion as its doctrine (O’Brien 1988; Dillon 1995). For the IRA, the message was clear: any Ulster solution was no solution, just a continuation of centre-periphery relations of the past. In such an environment all activism must be ensconced in the symbol of resistance to the state, and its continued denial of communal peripheral rights, ie, nationalism (Dunn 1993: 24).

It is significant that during each reform period, the exclusion of the IRA from direct negotiation processes would see the rise in their support base, as in the times of the 1993 Joint Declaration and the 1995 Frameworks for the Future (Farren & Mulvihill 1995: 1). Clearly what has developed is a strategy of insurrection in order to create opportunity structures. The conservative reaction of the centre to ignore this only serves to isolate the centre from access to the more radical Nationalist community, resulting in short term polarisation. Denying the IRA access to political opportunity structures offered in the negotiation process serves only to heighten the perceived exclusive nature of the Ulster elite’s centralist strategies.

The Irish Nationalists were rewarded for their willingness to review their protest strategy in contemplating a cessation of the armed struggle. What the Humes-Adams talks of 1993 were able to achieve, was the formulation of a de facto national movement front in terms of a convergence of perceptions, if not strategies. One that could be representative of both militant and formal wings of the national movement, via recognising the necessity of placing joint demands before the state (Mallie & McKittrick 1997: 271-275). Central to this evolution of the disparate wings of the Republican movement towards a more unified stance vis-à-vis the state, has been moulding and remolding of the movement through the perceived need to compliment the shifting nature of the state’s own re-consolidation process. As one SDLP councillor recognised:

There is a legacy between our parties there but we equally recognise that they have evolved fundamentally since the Hunger Strikes in terms of policy and practice and that we think that they should evolve further. 8

The Joint (Downing Street) Declaration of Major and Reynolds on December 15 1993 was a direct response to the Hume-Adams initiative designed to convince the IRA to halt its military campaign so as to encourage Sinn Féin to join the normal political process (Boyle & Hadden 1994: 131; Coogan 1996: 436-446). This was the continuation of the processes of 1973 that were unceremoniously dumped in the wake of strong Protestant civil action that culminated in the Ulster Workers’ Union strikes of 1974 (Fisk 1975: 48). Through subtle persuasion, and the reopening access points within the state, the Security Forces came to the realisation that any further political crackdown would only lead to a further radicalisation of the action-reaction-action cycle. The IRA could rightly claim this a success of their strategy, as in the long run, it did bring a highly peripheralised and illegal movement into the centre of policy formulation (Taylor 1987: 343).

Amongst the Protestant community, this has led to a situation whereby the British state is viewed as more responsive to Republican calls due to the ability of Hume to network within the political opportunity structures offered it (Morrow 1995; Clayton 1996). Thus, bringing the Republican cause to the centre of the political agenda of state (Dunn & Morgan 1994: 16-17). In my opinion, the reasons why the ceasefire lasted for 17 months lay in the positive publicity that the IRA were able to accrue from the British media for their unilateral decision back in 1994. It was interesting that when they felt that Major was stalling and backtracking on the original agreement (Taylor 1997: 465), that was clandestinely formulated with the Security Forces by Martin McGuinness over a three year period prior to the commencement of the cease fire (Taylor 1997: 465), the IRA chose to strike at the geographic heart of London, at the Docklands in February of 1996. This suggests that the IRA will not walk away from past strategies if they feel the centre is using negotiations as a tactic to buy time for the re-consolidation of their own Security Forces predominance within the province.

The greatest success gained from the The Joint Frameworks Document of 1995 was three pronged: it created space for the movement in the power-sharing executive for the province, it would allow for a strategic shift in methods of governance, and would allow the Republic of Ireland to act as a political guarantor for the Republican community in much the same way that the British Government had for Unionists (Kyle 1995: 5). These documents have forced the IRA and SDLP to adopt more formalised political structures, as new principles of conflict resolution have been built on democratic consent (Farren & Mulvihill 1995: 6). For the state, this places the significance of its survival as the sole mediator between competing ideological movements at the centre of any conclusion. Perpetuating its existence through using the co-operation of these movements to further legitimise its position. A fact that the overall Republican Movement has long accepted:

There are certain ground rules that are established but the British Government’s role is central in that it is the sovereign authority in Northern Ireland and its responsibility therefore is to create the political process and structures through which we can engage in dialogue and negotiation about the future. 9

The lessons of the 1970s had taught the centre that direct engagement in overzealous policing by the state only leads to an upswing of protest activism. Gallagher (1995: 33) suggests that the rising electoral fortunes of Sinn Féin as well as the realisation that overt military intervention by the state would only increase the cycle of violence rather than stem it. In this way, the British Government has tacitly recognised the role they have played in the upswing of protest action and the diversification of the repertoire of extra-parliamentary protest. Hence, the move to negotiate rather than confront, signals the desire for a relegitimation of the constitutional path as the sole path to political reform of the state (ibid.: 7). Yet it may also question the validity of possessing a revolutionary national movement doctrine at the core of mobilisation, as it serves only to distance further the IRA from not only the centre, but much of the war weary nationalist community as well.

The Good Friday Agreement: Movement Sacrifice? Or National Resurrection?

The Good Friday Agreement of April 10 1998 was significant for the eventualisation of the Republican movement’s political goal of national reunification with the Republic of Ireland and the withdrawal of the British state military and political presence from the province. A great fear in Nationalist ranks lay in the willingness of Dublin to bring the SDLP into All-Party talks without leaving equal space for Sinn Féin’s agenda to be represented. Added to this was Sinn Féin’s fear of a renewal of ‘Stormont’ whose abolition in 1972 was considered a Republican strategic success. Sinn Féin came to realise that they faced the possibility of being isolated from the peace process by the very reforming state centre they had opposed, and in doing so leaving much of their own Republican constituency without representation in the future make up of the state (Patterson 1997: 229). Thus, Adams, McLaughlin and McGuinness main task became securing a place for Sinn Féin at Stormont without decommisioning IRA weapons or negating the role of a republican solution to the ‘Troubles’. Yet to legitimate Republican demands the IRA Army Council would have to be convinced of the benefits of alleviating Protestant fears of alienation from Britain. This was done by emphasising the language of ‘joint-sovereignty’ found within the December 1993 Downing Street Declaration and the February 1995 Joint Framework Document as a base for negotiation and legitimation of both Catholic and Protestant interests (ibid.: 249-251).

The release of a British and Irish joint communiqué on February 28 1996 that All-Party Talks were to go ahead on June 10, even after the February 9 Canary Wharf bombing heralding the end of the August 31 1994 IRA ceasefire, signified that the centre was willing to reform in order to resolve the conflict it was instrumental in initiating (ibid.: 288-289). Yet the refusal of the Major Government by November 1996 to allow Sinn Féin into the All-Party Talks until the IRA promised a decommissioning of weapons and a ‘convincing unequivocal’ ceasefire was a stumbling block to resolution of the ‘Troubles’. All this could achieve was to convince the Republican radicals that the Northern Irish state was irreformable as long as the British state refused to deal with the IRA. The mood would change with the victory of Tony Blair in the May 1997 UK General Election and the fact that Sinn Féin would win a 45% share of the Nationalist vote at the May 22 local government election (ibid.: 293). Still they were moving towards a “Sunningdale Mark II” in this power sharing arrangement that would see the cycle come full circle (Bew et al 1997: 3-4). Interestingly, though, Republicans intimated that an All-Ireland framework for peace would have to be achieved within ten to fifteen years or they may return to the policy of the gun (Patterson 1997: 296).

A new path was forged when after the July 21 1997 ceasefire declaration, Blair moved to include Sinn Féin in All Party Talks. This heralded a new state culture of ‘consent’ which would grant the Ulster state legitimacy (as Catholics would have to respect the Protestant numerical majority within the new Stormont) in return for active Protestant acceptance of some six cross-border institutions and ten ministries with executive powers. Moderate Protestant Ulstermen would cede control over arts, cultural, national parks and estuaries’ policies to the very state that they perceived as responsible for supporting Catholic mobilisation since the 1960s. What was emerging was a tacit recognition by prominent Unionists John Taylor, Sir James Molyneaux and, his successor, David Trimble that any continuation of the crisis would lead to a stratification of the conflict and an eventual paralysis of the state that was the symbol of the historic continuity of Ulster state development to modernity (Bew et al 1997: 210-211). In turn, Republicans, through the radicalisation of the movement, may have successfully placed their demands on the table through VDA, yet any further continuance of VDA could run the risk of isolating them from the All-Party Talks. Already both Dublin and London have made it clear that talks would go ahead with or without Sinn Féin (Duignan 1995: 147). Yet it would be a mistake to believe that the gun has been permanently taken out of the debate as one in four of the Northern Irish electorate voted for party political organisations heavily linked to para-military organisations at the May UK General and Northern Irish Local government elections (Bew et al 1997: 213).

The All-Party talks, an integral precursor to the Good Friday Agreement’s revamped ‘Stormont’ Assembly, was radically reshaping the atmosphere in which negotiations could commence for the formation of joint institutions of governance that would include an ‘Irish Dimension’. In doing so Protestant fears of alienation from Britain through the enforced acceptance of Sinn Féin participation were alleviated by the realisation that any formal recognition by the Republicans of the necessity for a ‘joint’ resolution would in itself be a tacit legitimation of the central role of both the Ulster state and British Government in the future completion of the peace process (McIntyre 1995: 115). In essence, for the first time in Republican movement history, the Republicans would recognise Ulster political claims, aspirations and traditions as a legitimate force within the overall history of the island, and not simply as an implanted colonial ideological construct.

The push for peace was now shaping the outlooks of the parties. On May 22 1998 a referendum was held in both the North and in the Republic on the acceptability of the Good Friday Agreement. 71% of the North and 94% of the Republic’s populations voted in support of the Agreement (Henning 1998: 1). Sinn Féin would eventually win 18 seats in the June 26 Northern Ireland Assembly vote out of 108 contested seats (Henning 1998: 9) and Adams, with the May 11 Dublin Sinn Féin Conference decision to pursue a united Ireland through political means behind him, would seek to appease the IRA by placing Republican movement issues at the centre of the new state assembly’s agenda (Fletcher 1998: 11). Equally significant was the appointment of Seamus Mallon of the SDLP, a Nationalist, to the position of Deputy Minister to Ulster Unionists First Minister, David Trimble (Henning 1998: 9).

I believe this signifies a drastic change in Northern Irish politics, but one that would not have been achieved without the IRA/Sinn Féin strategy of the “armalite and the ballot box” developed throughout the 1980s. The national movement’s reliance on VDA in times of a down swing in the cycle of protest enabled the periphery to remain a threat whilst the centre remained unresponsive to their demands. This is what marks the significant difference of “Suningdale Mark II” from its 1974 predecessor, in that the years of violent protest strategy and movement repertoire expansion awakened the Ulster Unionist to the possible intractability of the crisis. A situation that would leave little space for the state elite to be able to absorb its discontented minority, and hence bring into question the continued ideological justification of the existence of democratic perspectives amongst the Ulster elite. Thus, the IRA, like it or not, had assisted moderate Nationalists to achieve their goal of equal representation, even if more irredentist policies may perhaps still be abandoned. Though I feel this is quite an unlikely scenario, as the communities have been too significantly polarised through VDA for them to so readily forgo their initial goals. Nevertheless, the gains at this stage significantly outweigh the losses.

The gains were a significant change in the Unionist willingness to accept Catholic political aspirations as essential to any internal resolution of the conflict; a restructuring of the RUC; a reevaluation of the nature of British state military and political involvement in the province, and the legitimation of an “Irish dimension’ to any future restructuring of the Northern Irish state’s power sharing relations. The losses were equally significant. The IRA and Sinn Féin would now have to accept the existence of a state that had to be the central target of their activism. Whilst greater civil rights and full enfranchisement may have been attained the state centre had successfully recreated itself as an arena of conflict resolution that could in the future ensure its existence in either a developed British umbrella framework or a federated Ireland. In terms of the continued existence of the movement this failure to dismantle the state, or the repromulgation of Stormont, all be it a heavily neutered version, has left many grass roots activists with a feeling of betrayal and mystification of what the past thirty years of struggle has been for. This feeling is best summed up by prominent Republican activist and ex-political prisoner Anthony McIntyre’s comments, as quoted by Patterson (1997: 278):

We went to jail, our people hunger striked, we suffered in protest, we died, and we killed an awful, awful lot of people in the process- we killed British soldiers, we killed an awful lot of RUC, we lost an awful lot of our own lives, as we blew up London, we blew up Belfast, we wrecked the place. Now we’re back to where we started.

A return to the past which begs the question of the Republican movement’s ability to reform itself amongst a constituency sick of conflict and the intransigence of both sides to find a lasting solution. Hope lies in the April 10 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Nevertheless, it is a political solution that exemplifies my thesis in that only through protracted conflict and the inability of the centre to reform can the national movement significantly polarise both sides in the conflict so as to have no other choice but to secede. The Ulster centre, having recognised the benefits of change, has created space for its own ideal, that of the continuity of a distinct Ulster state development, to survive. Though lasting peace may be the result, the much sought after Republican goal of a 32 county All-Irish Republic has failed to arise.

Conclusion: The Formalisation of the Cycle and the Perpetuation of the Conflict.

As demonstrated in this chapter the ability of the national movement to engage the state through multi-dimensional strategies of protest has been the key to placing the national dimension at the centre of the political agenda. Otherwise, it is doubtful whether or not the initial protest activism undertaken in the 1960s by the NICRA could have developed past the short term goals of radical student protests. At the same time, due to the lack of will by both sides to compromise, the subsequent polarisation of society between two competing national ideologies has led to a corresponding state of inertia in the process of conflict resolution and a further perpetual development of the crisis. Under such circumstances it seems difficult to view the possibility of resolution without the state placating the demands of both the periphery and newly radicalised centre alike.

The ability of the national movement to thus control the nature of the struggle, through ‘mimicking’ the reactions of the state, has led to a failure of the state, in its current form, to provide any solution to the crisis. In this way, the manipulation of a cycle of reform that the movement did not fully initiate, so as to provide the necessary political opportunity structure within the perpetual struggle between centre and periphery, has allowed for the nationalist doctrine to develop a legitimacy within its own constituency. There seems to be little left for the national movement to do but recreate its own space within the perpetual struggle between reforming state and reshaping periphery. The position the IRA holds as the minority movement is one that limits its options once the conflict is resolved, thus questioning the raison d’être for the continuation of the movement itself.

In the subsequent chapters I will demonstrate how this in fact has limited the Irish nationalist movement in ways that it could never have with the Basque and Croat nationalist movements. Peripheral movements that had similarly manipulated cycles of protest in times of shifting state centres and reforms due to their positioning as majority communities within the geographic boundaries they represented. Under such circumstances there is little choice for the militants of the Republican community but to continue the struggle, for within the struggle there is a sense of design and purpose for the future development of the national community.

In Northern Ireland the deification of protest and the cultural claiming of mythology in activism has led to the development of more than a counter movement. Rather it is a communal national movement that is at once hindered and assisted by its tradition of resistance. It is hard to see whether or not this sense of national community can survive without the state that defines it in opposition. The cycle of repression provides, according to past studies that similarly deal with radical peripheral communities conducted by della Porta and Mattina (1985), a communal purpose. A reinterpretation of communal repression, that through its own a polarisation of civil society threatens to create a new movement, or consciousness, steeped in the state’s own tradition of repression of the periphery.

This Protestant Ulsterism, which in itself will find it difficult to submerge its identity into that which is defined by the Southern state has arisen as a state backed counter ideology that can only solidify with each step of the IRA to intensify the crisis. Consequently, the results of the Irish movement’s protest activism’s successful dismantling of the Protestant governmental majority of Stormont has been outweighed by what Wilson (1991) and Conversi (1994, 1995) call the ‘ethno-gensis’ of a militant ‘other’. A militant counter-movement that itself is defined solely in terms of its ability to justify its existence in the face of the continued mobilisation of radical Republicanism.

The wave of Loyalist Volunteer Force killings from January to March 1998,10 in response to the Maze Prison assassination of their leader Billy Wright by the IRA splinter movement, the Irish National Liberation Army, is an example of how the Republican intensification of violence simply continues the cycle (Breen 1998: 16; S.M.H. 19.I.1998: 6). A continuation of reciprocal strategy ‘mimicking’ in ‘tit for tat’ killing that simply isolates the radicals from future negotiations. Thus, allowing the current Blair New Labour Government to portray the IRA’s demands as far from suitable in bringing around a solution to the ‘Troubles’ (Cowley 1998: 14; Harnden & Jones 1998: 9). A stratification of the cycle that has created an ideological impasse. One that has now set in place the irreconcilability of two ideological movements that have become identifiable with the movements’ place within the conflict, as opposed to the cyclical reciprocal development of both national movements to modernity.

This intransigent polarisation of conflict has created the seeds for a new conflict that may lead to a shrinking of the geographic boundaries of the North to four of the six counties, but may also lead to the counter formation of a new elite that will be schooled in the same anti-state insurgency of the radical Catholic community. I feel, this is derivative of the nature of the actual cycle of action-reform-reaction-repression in the Northern Irish case study and the inability of the national movement to convince the Protestant elite, as opposed to the British Government, of the necessity of a full opening of political opportunity structures of state and access to this elite.

An overall control of state has nevertheless remained the goal of the IRA. This is because for the IRA the goals of the NICRA were puerile so long as enfranchisement remained the main issue. The IRA desired nationhood, and as such the nation-state remained its main goal of mobilisation. Protest, demonstration and collective activism within the overall cycle of state reform-protest-reform was to supply an historic link to past protest movements. A ritualisation of competing demands that would lead to a radicalisation of the movement, and eventually the state it opposed.

The problem with the cycle of Northern Ireland is that both elites have manipulated it to consolidate their national aspirations, coming to identify their advantage in terms of the conflict, and this in itself will lead to problems of transition if a solution emerges from the Prime Minister Blair backed extension of the Downing Street Declaration ‘All Party Peace Talks’ and the April 10 1998 Good Friday Agreement. This is due to the fact that the very national movements that once merely represented the communities have become the backbone of the politicisation of these communities.

In many ways, the responses that the cycle action-reaction-action has attained from the state, and their utilisation in the consolidation of national movement gains, has led to a solidification of the crisis to the extent that they are no longer symbolic of popular discontent, but have come to embody and define both communities. In this way the expansion of repertoire to include VDA as an augmentation of more formalised, and more NVDA, oriented strategies as a tool of movement mobilisation, in an environment defined by competing nationalist aspirations, has led to the intractability of the ‘Troubles’; and more importantly a redefinition of both communities and movements in opposing the ‘other’.