Time for IRA to beat its swords into plough shares

WITH loyalists quoting Terence MacSwiney, it is time for the Provos to hammer their Armalites into ploughshares. David Ervine, of the Progressive Unionist Party, in appealing to the IRA to reinstate its ceasefire, cited the words of MacSwiney: "Victory is won not by those who can inflict the most, but by those who can endure the most."

An effective revolutionary movement knows when to change strategy, as well as tactics. The leaders of the 1916 Rising surrendered after one week. But Elizabeth O'Farrell carried the flag of surrender, not of defeat. By sacrificing their own lives, Pearse and his comrades advanced the War of Independence. On the other hand, by soldiering on in 1922-23, the IRA plunged the country into generations of stagnation in the South and repression in the North. The Civil War was our worst disaster since the Great Famine.

John Bruton has asserted: "It is no tribute to the memory of the republican dead to continue with a policy that simply cannot work." Neither, as the Loyalist Command stated, must we permit the past to dominate our future. Further republican violence merely shatters the nationalist consensus and presents the unionist leadership with a credible pretext for stalling.

Gerry Adams was correct when he described the British attitude as minimalist and begrudging. But there is unlikely to be radical change in the North this side of a Westminster general election. A weak Tory government facing an election is an unreliable negotiating partner. Nationalists should look to the Labour Party which, since 1981, is committed to Irish unity by consent.

IN THE meantime the Framework Document spells out the political reality that the North is Irish as well as British: In it the British government recognises "that it is for the people of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively and without external impediment, to exercise their right to self determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish"; both governments accept, however, "that the option of a sovereign united Ireland does not command the consent of the unionist tradition, nor does the existing status of Northern Ireland command the consent of the nationalist tradition. Against this background, they acknowledge the need for new arrangements and structures - to reflect the reality of diverse aspirations"; and this new approach will be enshrined in British constitutional legislation "either by amending of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 or by its replacement by appropriate new legislation."

There are different concepts of Irish unity, according to Father Gerry Reynolds, of Clonard Monastery. "The only rational understanding of it is an agreed Ireland, where we have a settlement which is fair to everyone and co determined by the two traditions. A unitary state forced on people would be mayhem, one in their right mind wants that. "

Father Reynolds said he did not wish Britain to go on putting money into Northern Ireland "so as to hold it together, when there is something deeper to be resolved here. The deeper need is to co determine our destiny in freedom with the people of the unionist tradition. I am certain that can be done, and done splendidly." The first step is "to meet without preconditions and to listen to one another".

Father Brian Lennon has written that Christian theology and political realities point to the need for reconciliation: "Our God is a God of community. We cannot share in the life of this God unless we also live as part of God's community in this world."

Father Lennon's fellow Jesuit, William Johnston, wrote The Wounded Stag - an epigraph for Christ - after a six month stay in Israel. Father Johnston's thoughts moved from Jerusalem to another divided city, his native Belfast. Often as a child he had climbed Cave Hill with his father. "Even at that time Northern Ireland was a vicious police state, and I knew that I belonged to a repressed and underprivileged minority."

FATHER Johnston wrote before the peace processes: "I have heard it said that the situation in Jerusalem is hopeless... that the situation in Belfast is hopeless. No solution! I do not believe this. If the situation in Belfast and in Jerusalem is hopeless, then the situation in the whole world is hopeless. For the problem is everywhere the same.

He identifies the basic problem as the human heart; the solution lies in metanoia or change of heart. This is the linchpin of all idealism.

After the Rising, Pearse told his court martial: "You cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed." This statement has underpinned the armed struggle. But in 1916 militarism was at the heart of European life: 200,000 Irishmen took part in the first World War.

The Home Rule settlement - endorsed by the British and Irish democracies - had, furthermore, been thwarted by a Tory Orange conspiracy. The likelihood is that Pearse, a humane idealist, would reject physical force in the transformed conditions of today.