Two ways to view the republican movement...

And in contrast a News Letter editorial wrote:

"The Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald said yesterday that the UK and Irish governments must “intervene” if the Northern Ireland talks to restore Stormont fail. 

“The current stalemate cannot continue, the current position is simply not sustainable,” she said. 

Irish nationalism's xenophobia against long settled Protestants

Sinn Fein MLA Phil Flanagan tweeted:

"Unionists didn't have a problem with immigration when their ancestors descended on Ireland to grab land from the native population..."

While, republicans don't have a problem with immigration, so long as it's not protestant immigration to Ireland of centuries past. As Eoin O'Malley of Dublin City University wrote in the paper 'Populist Nationalists: Sinn Fein and redefining the 'radical right'':

"Nationalism in Ireland cannot sit easily with anti-immigrant bigotry (as long as the immigrants are not long settled Protestants."

True Irish republicanism is anti-imperialist and anti-EU

Ruairí Ó Brádaigh speaking into a microphone

Ed Moloney wrote:

"The peace process was… A massive ideological compromise by Provisional leaders which would, inevitably, lead to IRA decommissioning and the transformation of Sinn Fein into a constitutional Nationalist party, not terribly different from the SDLP."

The Good Old Provisional IRA

In 1991, on the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916, Gerry Adams pointed to the Proclamation in the Sinn Fein Press centre, and declared to journalist Suzanne Breen: 

"Would any of the men who signed that document have signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement? Would Tom Clarke have extradited Dessie Ellis?

No way would those people be involved in talks about talks, rolling devolution, Atkins’ round-table conferences and the whole litany of Sunningdale-Darlington."

David Trimble - The Easter Rebellion of 1916

Published in 1992

Click the link to read each chapter: Chapter One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven.

The IRA proclaimed itself "the lawful and legal" government of Ireland,why does it reject the standards and responsibilities of a moderngovernment?

The IRA Green Book was in existence while the IRA, (1956 edition), and the PIRA, (1977 edition) waged their armed stuggle. The Green Book said:

"Commitment to the Republican Movement is the firm belief that its struggle both military and political is morally justified, that war is morally justified and that the Army is the direct representative of the 1918 Dail Eireann Parliament, and that as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic, which has the moral right to pass laws for, and to claim jurisdiction over the territory, air space, mineral resources, means of production, distribution and exchange and all of its people regardless of creed or loyalty."

Edward Carson, father of the IRA?

In the final lines of the September 1913 poem, Yeats wrote, "Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone. It’s with O’Leary in the grave." The rebel leaders shared these fears and, inspired by the rebellion of Edward Carson, they later emulated Carson's example.

Unionism won, Ctd

The IRA murder decades were a catastrophic, monumental, spectacular failure. The IRA's only triumph was to further polarise Protestant-Catholic and Planter-Gael relations, and to further poison the ability of protestants to self-identity as Irish (see research here). It ripped apart the Planter and the Gael and left Northerners with the demented notion that unionists are not and cannot be Irish.

Before 1916 and partition unionists were Irishmen. Before the IRA campaign many unionists saw themselves as Irish, now many few do. Sinn Fein reps have been known to speak to Americans, called themselves Irish unionists as British.

When Catholic was taken to mean IRA supporter

The front bench at the first informal meeting of the Ulster Parliament, Belfast City Hall (June 7 1921). Down from Sir James Craig (in top hat) are HM Pollock, Minister of Finance; Sir Dawson Bates, Home Affairs; JM Andrews, Labour and Sir Edward Archdale, Argiculture (see here)

Alex Kane wrote that there are Seven Eras in the history of Northern Ireland, explaining that the first was anti-Catholic:

"Between 1921-1963 successive unionist governments chose to regard all Catholics as hardline republican."

From United Irishmen to Unionists

Archibald Hamilton Rowan who moved from physical force separatism to parliamentaryism, a precedent set and followed to this day

What happened to the radical presbyterians who made up the United Irishmen, particularly in Belfast and in the north of Ireland? It seems they became unionists, malcontent radicals made content by the prosperity of the Union of 1801.

Martin McGuinness - From unbending hardliner, to the humanised andacceptable face of republicanism

Northern Ireland politicians from the early 1990s, by Gerald Scarfe for the New Yorker

In present Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness is viewed as the more moderate and conciliatory politician compared with the Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. Yet a quick down historical accounts and observations show that the reality is the inverse. As is often the case in Northern Ireland, perception is incongruent to fact. Northern Ireland poet Nick Laird wrote:

"Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and for being the officer commanding of the Derry brigade of the IRA, a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972."

Sinn Fein revisionism

Gerry Adams wrote about the 'Good Old IRA', equating the PIRA to the IRA that brought about partition 

Sinn Fein and IRA were not about attaining human rights but about attaining a united Irish socialist republic at the cost of human rights and human life. Most of the Civil Rights demands Sinn Fein claim the Provisional IRA secured through violence were achieved before the organization was even born at the end of 1969 In 1972 the IRA announced that they would rid Ireland of the British even if they had “to demolish Belfast brick-by-brick”. Martin McGuinness said around 1973:

"It doesn’t matter a fuck what John Hume says, we’ll go on fighting until we get a united Ireland."

Michael Longley - Green wank and Orange wank

Michael Longley with his portrait by Colin Davidson. See Longley with Mallie and I here.

Michael Longley met David Remnick on his 1994 visit to Belfast. They went for a walk and talk at the Giant’s Ring in South Belfast in 1994.

"These sides are divided from each other in their souls. They adhere to ridiculous visions of themselves and their histories. I call it ‘the green wank’ and ‘the orange wank’."

David Remnick - Gerry Adams has no right to the comparison with Mandela (1994)

Gerry Adams, by Martin Rowson

David Remnick visited troubled and torn Belfast in the early 1990s. He wrote about his experience and interpretation in the New Yorker, published in April 1994. You can read Remnick's account of his meeting with Gerry Adams in his Sinn Fein office in early 1990s Belfast here. It was an incredibly broad and detailed account of life in Belfast and Northern Ireland at the time. A note on how Belfast was very serene outside of the hotspots, how loyalist and republican paramilitaries are simply base gangs like in any other city; he painted a picture from his trip to Paisley's church, Martyr's Memorial; told us about Gerry Adams's hallowed republican forbears; and retold us about his ramble in the greens of outer Belfast with Michael Longley. One of the aspects of the long essay that most hit me was when David Remnick said that Adams no right to the comparison with Mandela or Arafat:

James Joyce on Fenianism (1907)

Doodles by Samuel Beckett, including a scribble of James Joyce

In 1907, aged 25, James Joyce wrote 'The Last Fenian'  and remarked upon the enduring struggle between violent and constitutional nationalism: 

"Anyone who studies the history of the Irish revolution during the nineteenth century finds himself faced with a double struggle — the struggle of the Irish nation against the English government, and the struggle, perhaps no less bitter, between the moderate patriots and the so-called party of physical force. This party under different names: ‘White Boys’, ‘Men of ‘98’, ‘United Irishmen’, ‘Invincibles’, ‘Fenians’, has always refused to be connected with either the English political parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They maintain (and in this assertion history fully supports them) that any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it is usually put, at the point of a bayonet."

Matt and drawing Northern Ireland politics

A cartoon by Matt cartoons following the OTR letter scandal

He shared a funny anecdote on Northern Ireland:

"I do remember doing a cartoon about a republican jail break some years ago, and in it they were tunnelling out dressed as a snake. I can’t remember why. But anyway, The Telegraph’s legal team is famously ferocious about copyright. They usually let nothing drop. But when they got wind that the cartoon had been reprinted without permission in An Phoblacht, they thought, ‘actually, we’ll let this one go on this occasion’."

Sinn Fein and the English Language

Cartoon by Ian Knox

When symmetry of scandal is met with an asymmetry of outrage, something is not right, and you have to say something. When an allegation is pointed at the church or an arm of the state, indignation is universally heaped on those named; yet when an allegation is pointed at the party, there is silence - indignation is selective and sectarian, falling along ideological lines.

With no sense or awareness of inconsistency, people can simultaneously support scrutiny of others and stridently oppose scrutiny of oneself; people can simultaneously credit allegations made against another but outright discredit allegations made against oneself. Mary Lou McDonald said in 2009:

100 years of trying to explain the difference between good and bad IRA men

By Martyn Turner (here)

Mike Burke, a lecturer in Politics in Canada, wrote on Anthony McIntyre's blog, the Pensive Quill:

"How could the Irish state… both celebrate its insurrectionary origins and conduct a counter-insurgency campaign against the Provisional IRA, which claimed to be the direct lineal descendant of the insurrectionary impulse that had given birth to the state?"

This is the southern state’s current and constant dilemma.

"So take it down from the mast, Irish traitors,
/It’s the flag we Republicans claim.
It can never belong to Free Staters,
For you’ve brought on it nothing but shame. Then leave it to those who are willing/
To uphold it in war and in peace,
/To those men who intend to do killing
 Until England’s tyranny cease."

The "Troubles" is a term for the conflict that began in 1916, ended with an ambiguous armistice in 1998 and rumbles on to this day

Cartoon of David Trimble and Gerry Adams by Steve Bell

[UPDATE - "Unfortunately, the "terrible beauty" they [Pearse and Connolly] spawned is even now to be seen in action in the blazing streets of Belfast" wrote John Banville]

Philip Bobbitt said that "Long War" is a term for the conflict that began in 1914 and concluded in 1990. Christopher Hitchens said the identical, that the global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union.

My argument is that the Troubles should be a term for the conflict that began in 1916 and quasi-concluded in 1998 with an ambiguous armistice, embedded a little further in 2005 but continues to this day with an uneasy truce.

He's a quick overview of history.

Ed Moloney - Censorship extended the Troubles by up to a decade

The Irish journalist Ed Moloney wrote in the Nieman Reports of Hardvard University here. He started with a brief historical sweep:

"Censorship has a long if not very honorable place in Irish history. The British imposed press controls during the 1919-21 war of independence, as did the pro-Treaty side in the subsequent Irish civil war. Newspapers were forbidden, for instance, to use words like “guerilla” to describe opponents of the new Irish government. Censorship lived on after the early Troubles. In the south of Ireland it took a less political and more religious form. The state censor was allowed to ban books and films on moral grounds, i.e. when they offended Catholic doctrine or values. 

In Northern Ireland censorship remained entirely political. In the 1920’s the pro-British Unionist government passed the Special Powers Act, a draconian piece of legislation which gave the police the authority to ban any dubious expression of political thinking and to imprison those responsible.