NO amount of talking at Stormont will deliver a lasting peace in the North the Republican Sinn Fein president, Mr Ruairi O Bradaigh, warned in his address to the ardfheis.
The discussions were based on a British agenda and did not provide for British government disengagement from Ireland, he said.
They were confined within the limitations of the AngloIrish Agreement, the Downing Street Declaration and the framework document.
"All of these give 18 per cent of the population of Ireland the decision on the future. The remaining 82 per cent counts for nothing." So, he added, the current process could not produce a British withdrawal from Ireland and therefore, could not give the people a permanent peace.
"History teaches us that as long as the British government remains here, there will be those who will oppose that British presence. History did not stop evolving in August, 1994.
Mr O Bradaigh said constitutional politicians down the years had used abusive language about Irish revolutionaries - before, during and after 1916. "It all depends on one's version of Ireland. The SDLP and those in the Provisionals who are willing to settle for a reformed Stormont with cross Border boards certainly see people who continue to struggle for a free Ireland as their political opponents.
SDLP leader Mr John Hume's version of an Ireland remaining under British rule was not the ideal of those who made sacrifices down the centuries, he said.
"Their model of British disengagement from our country, and completely new structures giving political space and power to both majorities and minorities, has a legitimacy that not even he can challenge."
Mr O Bradaigh said that as the Provisional IRA gradually changed into a constitutional political party, it would vacate revolutionary situations. "We must fill those vacuums, for if we do not, those empty spaces will be filled by others."
The tasks to be confronted were surely monumental, but duty called to the freedom struggle, he said. "It is now more widely accepted, as the days pass, among republican minded people, that our analysis is correct, that we are right at this time - and have been since 1986. We must, then, by the diligence of our work, give leadership.
