The sands are shifting under our feet even as we speak. What we have taken for granted is no longer as it was. It’s not the centre that cannot hold but the entire framework. It isn’t one terrible beauty that’s born but many. The only thing we can be sure of is change.
Well, here’s a change: the IRA has abandoned its 35-year armed campaign. All volunteers have been instructed to "assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means".
We’ve had the IRA with us for so long it has been woven into the fabric of our lives, our assumptions and our narratives. Loathe it or love it, it’s just been there.
It dominated many a day’s news. It insinuated itself into conversations with visitors. It left its trail in song and story and its bloody spoor across the landscape. It divided families and communities. It brutalised society and debased language. It returned the gun to centre stage in Irish politics and put the gun into Irish crime for good measure.
In these ways, the IRA campaign, '70 - '05, caused many of us to reconsider our inheritance from the old days, the ambiguity and casuistry, the ‘snakin’ regard’.
This was far from universal. Indeed, while the announcement of the end of the campaign was met with anger in many Republican strongholds in Northern Ireland, elsewhere there was, and is, doubt and suspicion. That the British Government has acted so swiftly to dismantle watchtowers and disengage troops has particularly enraged the Democratic Unionist Party.
One understands why, but only to a degree. There’s a bigger gain that they may be missing, the prospect of a society that is not overtly at war. But herein lies a possible reason for the DUP’s paranoid fury – how will the unionists identify themselves in the absence of the IRA?
In many ways, the rise and rise of the DUP is the most concrete expression of the degree to which Republican and loyalist terrorism has embedded itself in mainstream politics. The DUP is defined by its opposition to armed Republicanism. Everybody knows what they are against, but there is much less clarity about what they are for. By ending the armed campaign, the IRA may well expose the DUP’s poverty of ideas. We shall see.
But the cessation is also a massive challenge for the IRA’s own members. Many know no other life. Many have been brutalised by their war, isolated from the real world in which ordinary decent people live, separated from the need to comprehend, accommodate and deal with all the stuff that an ordinary life throws at you.
Well, it’s there in the declaration that they ‘must not engage in any other activities whatsoever’. I take that to mean no crime. But there will also be questions about what is meant by ‘political and democratic programmes’. Like, Robert Mugabe would call himself a democrat.
It is also the case that much remains unsaid and unrevealed. The IRA hasn’t apologised for the death and destruction and misdeeds. Bodies are still missing. Just wrapping it all up won’t heal broken hearts and bones and minds.
But, for now, the glass is half full. Let’s take the statement at face value. It’s welcome. Let’s hope that more follows; for example that graves are identified. And the spotlight now falls on the loyalists. Splintered into many parts and closely welded to drug trafficking and crime, it may take a while longer for them to see the light.
It’s a different world now, whether or not they realise it. And Britain, to which they noisily pledge allegiance has changed too. The focus of the UK’s security policy is no longer Irish Republican terror but Islamic terror, much of it home-grown to boot.
The need to understand and communicate with the Irish has slipped down the order of priority. Now the British seek to understand and communicate with themselves. Quite what the Loyalists make of that is anybody’s guess.
The old loyalist notion of a white Protestant UK is no longer tenable. As the British reconcile themselves with being as they now are, for better or worse, where will loyalism, and indeed Unionism, fit?
It’s a great challenge. Carl Jung’s words seem appropriate:
“All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble…They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This ‘outgrowing’ proves on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the horizon and through this broadening of outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge.”
That’s where we are now. We haven’t ‘solved’ the problem, but a stronger desire to do so is apparent in many quarters. Would that were universal.