Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, now a member of a UN advisory panel, in a lecture in Dublin in June noted that more civil conflicts had been resolved by negotiation in the last 15 years than in the last 200, and that the number of violent deaths had dropped from over 200,000 a year for most of the 1990s to between 20,000 and 30,000.
He called these "extraordinary achievements" (Amnesty, September).
Properly conducted peace processes save lives. To quote last Sunday's Observer, here in Ireland there is no Faustian pact. Democracy wins through. Breakthroughs in one place encourage peace elsewhere.
The physical force tradition, whose one unequivocal success was in 1919-21, and which plumbed many depths in more recent times, is virtually at an end. It was never capable of addressing the problems of a divided society or a partitioned country.
Many people have a Manichean view of our past, either dismissing constitutionalism or denying that physical force ever produced any good. Ignored is the intermediate role of passive resistance in O'Connell's campaigns, Parnellite parliamentary obstruction, in the Land League, Sinn Féin's policy of secession, and in the civil rights movement. Was even John Redmond purely constitutional when he had control of the Irish Volunteers? Cumulative progress up to 1921 was achieved by a combination of approaches.
Outside Northern Ireland, after 80 years of independence, it is easy to forget that Ireland was long a conquered country, with physical force used unhesitatingly to maintain subjection.
All countries have exercised the right to fight for their freedom. Among the least-disputed rights, since the UN was founded, has been the right of colonised peoples to national self-determination. It is an extraordinary notion that Ireland, alone among nations, was wrong ever to shed a drop of blood in pursuit of the uncomplicated part of its freedom and independence.
At grassroots level, the physical force tradition goes back to the Whiteboys, if not the tories and rapparees. At elite level, paramilitarism can be traced back to the Irish Volunteers of Grattan's day, which pressurised the Irish Parliament to claim legislative independence.
In June 1914 the Cork corps of Irish Volunteers, describing themselves as "members of a permanent defence force" that would form "a national army", added "such a force has not been seen in Ireland since the great days of Grattan" (Cork Archives Institute).
The United Irishmen wanted legitimately to form a secular Irish Republic on the model of revolutionary America and France. French aid was two-edged. Stirring up fears of Orange extermination backfired disastrously in Wexford; 30,000 died amidst brutal carnage.
The experience inhibited open rebellion for 100 years. Political agitation and constitutional methods, the only options left, made slow but steady progress in the 19th century, though small armed affrays, like Emmet's rebellion in 1803, by Young Ireland in 1848, and the Fenians in 1867, had lasting resonance. From Fintan Lalor on, there was a determination not just to undo the Union, but the conquest.
National revolutions invariably start with small groups. Seven men invited William of Orange to dethrone James II, leading to the "Glorious Revolution". Seven men signed the Easter Proclamation in 1916.
A little known French general, Charles de Gaulle, without electoral mandate, on June 18th, 1940 in a broadcast from London called for continued defiance of the Germans following crushing defeat. He came to incarnate the legitimacy of France. The mandate came later.
Irish republican legitimacy, though fractured in 1922, was established in a similar way, though the condition of Ireland in 1916 was not remotely that of France in 1940. Its achievement was to free Ireland just sufficiently from what a memorandum accompanying British legislation in 1920 described as "crown colony government".
Independent statehood has become a huge advantage. As Prof Martin Jacques puts it, "an independent nation-state remains the most important means by which peoples can exercise control over their own destiny" (Guardian, September 17th).
Sinn Féin points out that terrible and indefensible things happened in the War of Independence. The difference lies in the overall legitimacy of that earlier struggle. Southern Protestants, like American loyalists in the early 1780s, and European settlers in colonial Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, lost out, and there are many sad and some tragic stories.
Yet, when the dust settled, and despite depleted numbers, a substantial proportion of the agricultural, business wealth and professional employment post-independence remained in Protestant hands.
Southern Protestants today, whatever reservations some may have about the past, have moved forward, and few have reason to feel sorry for themselves. Few wish to be used by outsiders for ideological purposes to shore up the unionist case.
Since 1922-1923 an indigenous democratic constitutional tradition has been consolidated. Most republicans associated with 1916, including the Pearse family and Countess Markievicz, gave their support to de Valera's participation in the State. It is wrong to attempt to validate an exclusive or dominant identity between 1916 and the Provisional IRA, where the connection to the State is much stronger.
Northern Ireland, which for so long lacked a proper democratic dispensation, now has one, even if part of it is in abeyance. Its full realisation requires reasonable confirmation of the abandonment of physical force. The future is constitutional.