The South Armagh IRA commemoration and the crisis within Unionism

The Troubles — the quixotic name given to the thirty years conflict in the North of Ireland between the British state, its loyalist proxy, and Irish republican volunteer organisation of various stripe — was not, as many contend ended but instead placed on hold by the landmark Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement) of 1998.

The lives saved as a result of the mainstream Irish republican leadership’s decision to enter the democratic process in the province and end the armed struggle can never be quantified. But countless lives were certainly saved nonetheless, with the succeeding generation spared the chaos and mayhem and violence which dominated and blighted the lives of so many in the 1970s, eighties and nineties, when the conflict raged across the North and beyond.

The say that history is written by the victors, which is true. However the only victor in this particular conflict is the profound sense of misplaced grievance that continues to colonise Ulster loyalist and Unionist thinking.

For the adherents of said ideology, the very notion of sharing physical and political space with Irish nationalists and…