Despite the general acceptance of the peace process in Northern Ireland a hardcore minority of dissident Republicans are discontented enough with the current situation to use violence, mostly directed against the security forces and government buildings, to express their dissatisfaction.
Their objective is to force ‘British’ withdrawal and achieve a united Ireland but I personally don’t understand how they expect to achieve this with their current methods, and they’ve been fairly low-key in expressing their viewpoint through the media (apart from fairly regular threats) and have a small and ineffective political wing.
My question is what is their long-term gameplan because I can’t see them making any progress towards their objective by thier current methods. I’ve heard that they intend to destabilise NI society and bring back ‘the bad old days’ in order to force the British government to deploy the army on the streets, thus increasing dissatisifaction in Nationalist/Republican areas.
However I can’t see the British government in London (a) being silly enough to actually do this and (b) having the resources, militarily, politically and economically to build up the security establishment that they’ve just spent ten years pulling down.
It almost seems like they’re doing it out of boredom. Their long term game-plan insofar as they have any is, as you say, bringing back the bad old days, so they can be big men who blow up soldiers. Except there is no popular support for them, nor for returning to those days, and the systemic inequality that led to the rise of the Provisional IRA no longer exists, so their methods seem outdated and barbaric to the vast majority of those who support an eventual united Ireland.
That could be a worst case scenario because how would you prevent such terrorism? They aren’t going to achieve their goals by their chosen methods, they aren’t open for dialogue to find alternate means of resolving their grievances, they don’t really care that they have no widespread support from any part of the community and with the best resources and strategies the security services can only minimise their operations, not prevent them entirely.
Its like that scene from Life of Brian except with serious real world consequences:
You don’t prevent it. Terrorism cannot always be prevented. There isn’t always a solution that is going to make everyone put down their arms. Just like you cannot eliminate crime. But as time goes on, the die-hards die off. And they don’t get new recruits to replace them, because there really isn’t anything left to gain that people feel strongly enough to kill children and die for. The people starting fighting again, as An Gadai said, are holdovers from the past. They miss the feeling they managed to convince themselves of that they were heroes. Those growing up aren’t suffering the same injustices - there isn’t a policy of internment, for example, radicalizing youths and driving them into the ranks of terrorists.
The problem is that despite the fact that most reasonable people would agree that NI is no longer the same place it was there is still a minority of people engaging in armed struggle, and this minority appears to be increasing in strength and support not withering away on the vine.
There only ever were a tiny minority engaging in armed struggle. The number of attacks (while each individual attack is barbaric and unjustifiable) that I don’t think it is really possible to say that they are increasing in strength. Even if there is an upswing in attacks, it can just as easily be seen as the same small group trying harder to be noticed.
As me old man used to say… “The Irish love a fight. And if they’re temporarily short of enemies they’ll start a fight among themselves just to stay in practice.”
Admittedly not PC, but there seems to be a kernal of truth there…