The Provisional movement has changed its strategy, composition and outlook over recent years. Many IRA personnel quite frankly admit in private that both the war and their capacity to wage it are over. In its place is a qualitatively different calculation. Sinn Fein no longer supports armed struggle as the only certain means of breaking the British connection. Instead the party leadership places great store in the unproven claim that demographics are moving inexorably toward a nationalist majority within the North within the next 15-20 years. – 2016 the year of victory!

Dubious strategy flows from dubious assumptions. And so republicans are asked to acquiesce in the strategy of acquiring parliamentary office, which in turn they believe shall lead to the northern state being reformed from within and transformed from without through cross-border quangos. These twin pressure points, they say, shall lead to the North becoming gradually but irreversibly detached from the British state and moved into a position of political union with the rest of Ireland.

Sinn Fein has held tenaciously to this view in spite of criticism from other republicans that war or no war, reforming the six-county state will at best only ever lead to a more stabilised and durable Northern state. Moreover, they insist that Sinn Fein participation in a Dublin government will take the party to the same destination already reached by the Workers’ Party.

For a period Sinn Fein could cloud its outright parliamentarianism behind the whiff of sulphur but now the radical balloon may be about to be pricked. Outmanoeuvred by Trimble’s UUP on the ‘Guns or Adams must go’ issue the Sinn Fein leadership’s life support machine – the Executive – is now suspended. Denied administrative power Sinn Fein’s position in the North may become like that of Plaid Cymru prior to the formation of the Welsh Assembly.

Alternatively, if the Provisionals surrender as much as one bullet they shall retain their strategic shape at the cost of what is in essence their soul, for Unionism will have proven itself capable of dictating terms. And rather than ‘A Nation Once Again’ resounding throughout the country the refrain may be ‘they sold their souls for Mercs and Rolls and Ministries of Health and Education.’

One unnoticed casualty in all of this has been the intellectual authority of the Sinn Fein leadership. So often endorsed by ard fheiseanna and the IRA, Sinn Fein’s grand strategy is now in doubt and the leadership’s judgement open to question. Thinking republicans must inevitably fill this intellectual vacuum or Irish republicanism shall wither and fade away.