In a potentially significant step that could end over three decades of violence in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland, the Irish Republican Army has ordered its members to discard their weapons. As noted in this earlier post, the I.R.A.’s continued use of terrorism in attempting to achieve its political goals — and some United States politicians’ often ambivalent stance toward it — represented one of the more troubling hypocrocies of the U.S.’s current War on Terror.

More than 3,000 people have died since Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” began in the 1970s, about two thirds of which were the result of IRA-sponsored incidents. The purported goal of the IRA’s campaign of violence to reunite Ireland and win independence from Great Britain. Despite that, IRA violence hasn’t been the top priority of U.K. security forces for several years. In 1994, the IRA declared a cease-fire in its war to force Britain out of Northern Ireland, but that cease-fire was violated when the IRA set off a huge bomb in London’s docklands financial district in 1996. Nevetheless, since a comprehensive peace deal in 1998, the only further attacks have been by IRA splinter groups. Political authority was shifted from London to a Northern Irish assembly in which Sinn Fein — the IRA’s political wing — briefly shared power with Northern Ireland’s majority Protestant parties, but the IRA’s failure to lay down its arms had prompted Northern Ireland’s mainly Protestant Unionist parties to continue objecting to Sinn Fein’s involvement in the government.
The United Irelander has some thoughts here on how the various interest groups in the U.K. are reacting to the IRA’s announcement.