As another anniversary of the 1916 Rising approaches, Deaglán de Bréadún reflects on the current crisis of identity in Irish nationalism and asks historians if republicanism can survive without the IRA.
Winston Churchill famously said in the aftermath of the first World War: "The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world."
However, Churchill could still observe today, as he did in his House of Commons speech in 1922, that "as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world".
But if little has altered on the surface in Northern Ireland, the basis for profound and fundamental change has existed since 1998 when the electorates on both sides of the Border approved the Belfast Agreement. The consensus in mainstream Irish politics is that the sole remaining obstacle to full implementation of the agreement is the continued existence of the Irish Republican Army, despite scepticism in some quarters that, even then, unionists will still find an excuse not to share power with nationalists.
Only two decades ago it was hard to imagine the world without seemingly immovable fixtures like South African apartheid and the Berlin Wall. Likewise it is still difficult nowadays to envisage an Ireland without the IRA. In recent times the debate has been dominated by the issues raised over the robbery at the Northern Bank as well as other allegations of criminality and, above all, the horrific killing of Robert McCartney.
But the scale and significance of what is taking place at a deeper level can be concealed in the dust and heat of day-to-day controversy. We may, in fact, be about to see a major chapter in Irish history coming to a close, if the IRA is stood down.
But can republicanism survive without the IRA, and will its adherents adapt to life without the comforting presence of a private army? Prof Richard English, author of Armed Struggle: A History of the IRA (Macmillan, 2003), believes they can. "I don't think there's anything inevitable about most republicans being committed to armed struggle: they judged that Northern [ Ireland] circumstances demanded it at a particular time," he says.
It's all about power. "The key question now is: how ambitious are republicans? If they really want to hold power in Belfast and Dublin, then the IRA has probably now become slightly more of a hindrance than an advantage.
"Gerry Adams may not want to stand them down just yet (and up till now he's not been forced to do so). But it will only be someone like Adams who has the capacity to make such a move when it comes - which it should," Prof English adds.
Prof John Coakley, a specialist in Northern Ireland politics, believes the IRA's claim to be involved in a legitimate armed campaign was undermined by the Belfast Agreement and the referendums North and South.
"Sinn Féin presented the agreement as a victory: it transformed the nature of the union and offered a mechanism for Irish unity in the long term," he says.
As a result, all is changed, changed utterly. "In this new scenario, the IRA could be considered redundant. So the survival of Sinn Féin without the IRA will depend on the capacity of the leadership to sell this message to its supporters," he says.
"It appears as if, notwithstanding recent events, the leaders have been relatively successful in this, and it is possible to imagine a transformed movement eventually opting for a purely political path."
Dr Michael Laffan of UCD sees Adams and Martin McGuinness facing a similar dilemma to previous leaders in the republican movement.
In 1926, for example, Eamon de Valera "abandoned the wild men whose support he had needed at the time of the Treaty split, and he decided to operate within political structures that he had condemned".
Similar choices were forced at different times on Michael Collins, Seán MacBride and republican leaders in the 1960s such as Cathal Goulding, he points out.
"In each of these four cases acceptance of political realities, of what was described at the time of the Treaty as 'the tyranny of facts', provoked a breach with those who chose purity over the pursuit of power," says Prof Laffan.
Historian and author Dr Eamon Phoenix says: "The vast numbers of new voters turning to SF on both sides of the Border are keen to see the republican movement cast off the albatross of the IRA and paramilitarism and ventilate their specific concerns in a constitutional way."
Up to now the IRA was a useful bargaining counter. "For the Sinn Féin strategists the last 10 years have been about making SF a party of government both North and South and 'having a minister at either end of a North-South body'."
The party had used the continued existence of the "pike in the thatch" - the IRA - to extract incremental concessions from the two governments and unionism. However, the events of recent months stemming from the Northern Bank robbery and the McCartney murder had laid bare the contradiction at the heart of this strategy.
Meanwhile, republican folklore tells us that the letters "IRA" first appeared on the walls of Dublin amid the flames and destruction of the 1916 Rising. We have arrived this weekend at another anniversary of that great drama, the seminal event of modern Irish history, which continues to exert such a hold over the Irish psyche and has inspired young people in successive generations to take up the gun for what they saw as the cause of national independence.
But for every youngster who rallied to the torn standard of the IRA, there were many more who did not, and one of the key, if largely unspoken, elements in the last 30 years in Ireland has been that the South mainly sat on its hands as war raged North of the Border.
The enormous challenge of accommodating a million unionists in the new Irish State was not dealt with in any comprehensive or useful way by the 1916 leaders. The Proclamation read by Pádraig Pearse outside the GPO that Monday morning 89 years ago contains only an oblique reference to the North when it deplores "the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past".
The same paragraph begins with a clarion-call: "The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman." The Proclamation clearly envisages a unitary state or at least a state where all would give allegiance to the Tricolour. But we receive no clues about how to cope with the large minority on the island who were not prepared to give such allegiance.
Surely they were not supposed just to leave? A mass exodus of Protestants from Northern Ireland was not only a tragic and distasteful prospect in itself, but ran contrary to Wolfe Tone's republican ideal of uniting Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.
Pearse and his colleagues would have been all too well aware that the majority in the North had recently rebelled against even the prospect of an all-Ireland administration under the crown.
It is one of the tragedies of the British over-reaction to the rebellion that some of the finest minds of that era were snuffed out before they could turn their attention properly to this issue and play their part, perhaps, in devising a creative solution satisfactory to both sides.
Since then we have had partition, a crude answer to the problem which proved ineffective in the long term. More recently those who claim the mantle of Pearse and the other 1916 signatories have been parties to the Belfast Agreement, which can be seen as a historic compromise between the two traditions, nationalist and unionist. It offers nationalists a chance to participate in the governance of the existing stateletwhile holding out the prospect of a united Ireland achieved by democratic and peaceful means.
Some critics and commentators claim the agreement is merely a refurbishment and consolidation of partition which will extend the shelf-life of a divided Ireland for many years to come. This is a very static view of history. Detente did not prevent the reunification of Germany in the long term but it did ease tensions and helped to avert the possibility of war between East and West.
If Irish nationalism cannot, over a period of time, attract the relatively modest proportion of unionists required to achieve a majority in Northern Ireland for unity, then it must be an inherently repellent and uninspiring ideology.
In the fullness of time, having worked successfully in government beside their nationalist neighbours, a sufficient number of unionists could conceivably have a change of heart and look to Dublin rather than London.