The right to self‐determination in Ireland and the justification of IRA violence

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Abstract
Sinn Fein's Scenario for Peace (1987) claims that the right to Irish self‐determination, as recognized in United Nations human rights declarations and as given effect by the Irish People at the 1918 British General Election, overrides the validity and authority of the Anglo‐Irish Treaty of 1922; since that Treaty imposed partition on Ireland without any reference to the expressed wishes of the people of Ireland. At the time, however, the Republicans in the South, led by De Valera, were opposed to holding a referendum or election on the Treaty, because they feared that the Treaty would be upheld in a popular vote. This cavalier approach to the self‐determination of peoples, it is argued, is to be found in the Republican fundamentalism characteristic of Sinn Fein and the IRA, who would never accept the result of a referendum which showed a majority of the people of the North and the South in favour of staying as they are. Nor would they be prepared to call off the armed struggle if a majority on both sides of the border voted in favour of accepting Article 1 of the Anglo‐Irish Agreement (1985), requiring any change in the status of Northern Ireland to have the consent of a majority of the people in the Province. After a discussion of the equivocal position taken up by Republican leaders in 1922 on the issue of the use of force to end partition, the article analyses the Sinn Fein plan for a British withdrawal from North Ireland by a set date. The plan provides for troop withdrawals to be accompanied by the disarming of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Regiment and the drawing up of a Constitution for a new United Ireland by a Constitutional Conference elected by the people of both the North and South. The facile nature of the assumptions that, faced with such a dreaded prospect, the vast majority of Northern Ireland Protestants would sit back or participate in it, rather than resist it by force, and that the leaders of the Republic would co‐operate in a nightmare scheme which would dump one million screaming fighting Protestants in their lap, are exposed. Having shown the moral inadequacy and political unreality of Sinn Fein's ill‐titled Scenario for Peace, the author outlines a possible alternative peace scenario for Sinn Fein consideration.

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