The Irish Example

Found here:

It’s difficult to fathom the enthusiasm for armed struggle among hardline Republicans. During the Dublin debate, the historian Brian Hanley made a point that seems unanswerable to me, as it must to the majority of those whose backing the ‘dissidents’ (a label they have always rejected) seek: if the British establishment wasn’t prepared to withdraw in 1972, when the Provos killed a hundred soldiers and wounded more than five hundred, why would they capitulate now to groups incapable of fighting a war at that pitch?

Also on the platform that night was Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA member and Long Kesh prisoner, and a very articulate and often funny critic of Gerry Adams. McIntyre’s cynicism about the peace process has not gone down well with the Provo leadership: Sinn Féin organised a ‘picket’ outside his home in Belfast, which eventually forced him to move. But whatever shortcomings McIntyre finds in the current strategy, he still thinks it ‘infinitely better than continuing to fight a futile war for the sake of honouring Ireland’s dead yet producing only more of them’. Referring to the RIRA attacks, he said:

It has sometimes been stated that ‘if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.’ Dead on all sides, graves, funeral processions, widows, children growing up a parent short, jails, human rights abuses and no united Ireland at the end of it all. Why this addiction to failure? Surely Republicanism has to be more imaginative than that.

Any semblance to any more local campaigns of violence is coincidental.

But the logic remains.