The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

The Republican leadership was moving steadily towards a new political vision based on three concepts. One, that as part of the ‘alternative method’, there should be a shared approach to the problem by all the Nationalist parties, north and south. This concept, as we shall see, was later to be broadened to include the Nationalist-minded of the Irish diaspora, particularly in America. Two, that whatever new Ireland might emerge from such an approach, it did not necessarily have to conform to the preferred Republican option of a thirty-two-county socialist republic, provided that it was a) democratic and b) worked out free of British dictation. The Government of Ireland Act would have to be abrogated. Three, that if and when a position was achieved wherein the Nationalists and the Unionists sat down to negotiate the new political institutions which such a new Ireland presupposed, providing a) and b) operated so that a form of genuine self-determination was possible, then Sinn Fein would accept any democratic decisions arrived at. What all this added up to was something very different from the traditional Republican approach of ‘Brits out’ and then on to a thirty-two-county republic. Adams and his colleagues were evolving away from the gun, and towards a political approach based on self-determination, for both Nationalists and Unionists. In a word, the Republicans were beginning to sue for peace. It was a turning point which demanded, and received, not only enormous moral and ...