Now, IRA stands for I Renounce Arms

Jul 28th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

After a three-year logjam in the Northern Ireland peace process, the IRA has announced that it is finally abandoning its armed struggle for a united Ireland—ordering its fighters to dump their arms and pledging henceforth to seek its goal by peaceful means. It is an historic day in a conflict whose origins go back more than five centuries. But those who want the province to stay British will take some convincing

FOR a group long notorious for its ambiguity and twisted words, the statement could hardly have been clearer: The IRA’s leadership, it said, “has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign. This will take effect from 4pm this afternoon. All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms.” All of the IRA’s “volunteers”, the statement continued, had been instructed “to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means.” The IRA said it now believed it had an “alternative way” to achieve its goal of ending British rule of Northern Ireland. The IRA might continue to exist, the statement implied—but more as an association of old comrades than a fighting force.

Besides pledging to put more than three decades of bombing and shooting definitively behind it, the IRA’s dramatic announcement, on Thursday July 28th, also ordered militants to cease all “other” activities—a presumed reference to the IRA’s extensive criminal activities.

The IRA’s pledges, if kept, could break a three-year logjam in Northern Ireland’s peace process. Under the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that launched the process, a power-sharing local government had been created, with complex rules to ensure that Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority (which is “unionist”, wanting the province to stay British) did not exclude from power the Catholic minority (which is “nationalist”, seeking a united Ireland). The IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, and the political representatives of hardline unionist militias were invited to take part if they renounced violence. But in 2002, mainly because the IRA still had not announced a definitive disarmament, the assembly was suspended and its powers taken back by London.

An attempt in 2003 to break the logjam with a carefully choreographed set of announcements from the protagonists ended in farce. Britain announced fresh elections to the Northern Ireland assembly. Sinn Fein’s leader, Gerry Adams, then pledged his movement’s “total commitment” to using exclusively peaceful means. Then the head of the independent body overseeing weapons-decommissioning announced that the IRA had destroyed another cache of weapons. Finally, the then leader of the suspended provincial government, David Trimble of the Ulster Unionists (UUP), was supposed to step up and promise to resume sharing power with Sinn Fein. But he said he could not, because of the IRA’s failure to give enough detail on the extent of its weapons destruction. Britain felt obliged to hold the elections anyway but the outcome was victory for the more militant parties on either side of the political-religious divide—Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists (DUP)—at the expense of more moderate ones.

Late last year, just when hopes were rising of a fresh start, the IRA was implicated in a huge bank robbery in Northern Ireland—which its political representatives must surely have known about, even as they were at the negotiating table. The credibility of the IRA and Sinn Fein was further damaged in January when IRA men knifed to death a Catholic man in a Belfast bar. The murdered man’s sisters took their campaign for justice to America, resulting in Sinn Fein’s leaders being banned from the White House’s annual St Patrick’s Day party (when Ireland’s patron saint is commemorated). Even Senator Edward Kennedy—a long-standing supporter of Irish nationalism—refused a meeting with Mr Adams and condemned the IRA’s criminality.

The backlash may have helped Mr Adams and other leaders of the IRA and Sinn Fein to convince the remaining doubters within their movement that the time had come for it to take the final step, pledging never again to sit with a gun under the negotiating table. Ironically, the timing of the announcement was reportedly delayed because the IRA did not want news of its statement to be overshadowed by the new, more violent terror campaign being waged by young Muslim jihadis on the British mainland.

Deeds matter more than words

However, though the IRA statement was uncharacteristically clear, all other parties will take some convincing that its fine words will be matched in deeds—especially the DUP, which noted that recent Northern Irish history was littered with IRA statements that had been described as historic but had not been delivered on.

Recently the DUP’s veteran leader, Ian Paisley, has been demanding that the IRA not only destroy all its weapons to the satisfaction of the weapons-decommissioning body but also produce photographs of the act. The IRA has rejected this “humiliation”. The proposal now is that a Catholic and a Protestant cleric also witness the act of disarmament. However, even if this happens soon, the power-sharing government is unlikely to be restored for some time. Talks may re-start in a few months, though Mr Paisley may take rather longer to end his refusal to sit around the same table as Mr Adams and company. If all goes well, a further round of elections is likely, perhaps next year, and perhaps for a while the Northern Ireland assembly will operate in “shadow” form, scrutinising the running of the province by Britain rather than appointing its own executive.

The roots of the Northern Ireland conflict are long and bloody, stretching back more than five centuries, from the English crown’s subjugation of the whole of Ireland, to the Protestant King William III’s defeat of the Catholic James II on the River Boyne in 1690, through to the island’s partition in the 1920s and the launch of the IRA’s violent campaign in the 1970s. Is the bloodshed all over? Will the province’s long-term future—joined to Britain or united with the rest of Ireland—now be settled, one day, by putting slips of paper in a ballot-box? There have been setbacks before and, until the unionists finally declare themselves satisfied that the IRA is disarmed, there may be setbacks again. But the chances look as good as they have done for some time.

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