What the IRA was being asked to do was concede that its own past campaign had been brutal and unnecessary, criminal rather than patriotic. Why else would weapons be a problem? If they were the means by which national rights had been justly won, then they were no embarrassment to anyone but those who opposed those rights.

If the IRA was still the legitimate armed defender of Irish national rights, having already served its cause with courage and distinction, who could reasonably insist that it disarm, even to secure what agreement had already been reached, let alone to help facilitate further progress?

Of course Unionists read the history of IRA militarism differently, as an unwarranted assault against them. As they see it, the past was bloody, their own pain was undeserved, and they could not be expected to seal political deals with Republicans unless the threat against them was lifted. Their myth extended to a sense of never having wronged anybody - honest.

So they were in dispute with Republicans over the past. You can see the importance of the Republican history to Republican people in their commemoration of the dead and in the nostalgic writings of Danny Morrison, among others. Their difficulty, and it is a real one, is reconciling the Good Friday Agreement with the bloody doings and bloody sacrifices of people who thought they were fighting on for a united Ireland.

The Republican Writers Group has described their dilemma astutely, and I find myself agreeing with their analysis, while rejecting their conclusion, for I am not an Irish Republican.

I applaud the changes republicans have made to their ideology and their redefinition of the Republican goal. It was the only way out of a pointless past; and I can see what a problem history is for them.

I have my own history to preserve too. It is a history which tells me that chauvinistic Unionism would have preferred to ignore me than squash me, and also that the IRA campaign was wholly inappropriate way of dealing with that, that the long war was the wrong war, an appalling waste.

I want to preserve the integrity of my reading of the past too, and I think it is easier to knit into the present than is the historic vision of the Provisionals. I am afraid however that in the coming years our children will learn in school that it was all somehow necessary and worthwhile.

I am afraid constitutional nationalism will not have the stomach for a
quarrel over history or the vision to find the authority in their own past for a distinctive vision of the future.