Mackers was also an outsider in another critical respect. Like many Provo foot soldiers, he was disillusioned by the Good Friday Agreement. Patrick Pearse once wrote that ‘the man who in the name of Ireland accepts as a “final settlement” anything less by one iota than separation from England is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation … that it were better that he had not been born’. This kind of absolutism formed the marrow of republican mythology: the notion that any acceptance of incremental change was tantamount to betrayal. In Mackers’s view, Sinn
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