There will be no new split in the republican movement leading to a return to violence in Northern Ireland, the Parnell Summer School in Co Wicklow was told yesterday.
Dr Eamon Phoenix, a media contributor on Northern politics and a lecturer at Stranmillis College in Belfast, said the Sinn Féin leadership "had succeeded where De Valera and Seán MacBride had failed" in convincing the IRA to disarm.
"The tragedy is that it took the lives of 3,500 people," he said. Dr Phoenix said that while nationalists believed "history will be on their side" in relation to a united Ireland, most were currently concerned with issues such as foreign direct investment.
"Northern Ireland now has the strongest equality laws in Europe . . . the sense of injustice that was there a generation ago is not there".
However, the Independent Wicklow councillor, Tommy Cullen, said some people believed the Belfast Agreement ceded for the first time a moral right to the British government to rule part of Ireland. In the light of this he asked Dr Phoenix if another split in republicanism was not inevitable, followed by a return to violence.
But Dr Phoenix said the strength of the success of Sinn Féin in convincing the IRA to disarm meant those who may have been expected to argue for an armed struggle were quiet.
"You see letters to the paper from them, but it is the end of major challenges from violent republicanism," he said.
Steven King, a former adviser to David Trimble, said he believed the Belfast Agreement did cede the moral right to rule Northern Ireland to the British government.
Mr King said it was always appreciated, "particularly in the 26 counties", that the Ulster Unionist Council had been a stabilising force in unionism, mediating between conservative and liberal forces.
"You think of the Ulster Unionist Council stuffing ballot boxes, but the only time that was really done was probably to keep a Paisleyite out," he joked.
"In the early years the council attempted to educate both communities together, but it was stymied by an unholy alliance of the Catholic Church and the Orange Order. From the 1930s there were more and more people in government from a more visceral Presbyterian background."
In terms of relationships with the South, Mr King said a unionist "would have to be a fool" not to notice recent changes in the 26 counties. He said the jury was out on recent economic gains in the Republic, but taxes were higher than in Northern Ireland and social welfare was not as good.