Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- 1 The Meaning of August 1969: Calibrating the Standard Republican Narrative
- 2 Blood Sacrifice and Destiny: Republican Metaphysics and the IRA's Armed Struggle
- 3 Republicanism's Holy Grail: ‘One Nation United, Gaelic and Free’
- 4 Permission to Kill: Just War Theory and the IRA's Armed Struggle
- 5 ‘Pointless Heartbreak Unrepaid’: Consequentialism and the IRA's Armed Struggle
- 6 Violating the Inviolable: Human Rights and the IRA's Armed Struggle
- 7 ‘Crime is Crime is Crime’: British Counter-Terrorism in Northern Ireland
- 8 ‘When the Law Makers are the Law Breakers’: State Terrorism
- Epilogue
- Endnotes
- References
- Index
- Plate section
3 - Republicanism's Holy Grail: ‘One Nation United, Gaelic and Free’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- 1 The Meaning of August 1969: Calibrating the Standard Republican Narrative
- 2 Blood Sacrifice and Destiny: Republican Metaphysics and the IRA's Armed Struggle
- 3 Republicanism's Holy Grail: ‘One Nation United, Gaelic and Free’
- 4 Permission to Kill: Just War Theory and the IRA's Armed Struggle
- 5 ‘Pointless Heartbreak Unrepaid’: Consequentialism and the IRA's Armed Struggle
- 6 Violating the Inviolable: Human Rights and the IRA's Armed Struggle
- 7 ‘Crime is Crime is Crime’: British Counter-Terrorism in Northern Ireland
- 8 ‘When the Law Makers are the Law Breakers’: State Terrorism
- Epilogue
- Endnotes
- References
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
I believe and stand by the God-given right of the Irish nation to sovereign independence and the right of any Irishman or woman to assert this right in armed revolution.
(Bobby Sands, on the first day of his hunger strike in the Maze Prison, 1 March 1981)Introduction
The fundamental republican conviction that the establishment of a united independent Ireland free from British control is a value worth dying (and killing) for is represented in various diverse media, including funeral orations, wall murals, political speeches, books, newspaper articles, prison journals, T-shirts, songs, websites, coffee mugs, commemorations and posters, as well as in the actions of republicans themselves, including political activism, hunger strikes and bombings. These disparate expressions do not add up to an explicit, systematic defence of the core republican conviction. Nor has the republican movement produced such a defence. Yet in the absence of such a defence, the moral justification of the IRA's armed struggle appears to be precariously ungrounded.
My aim in this chapter is to bring together and critically examine arguments that attempt to establish a right of the Irish people to a united independent thirty-two-county Irish state. For clarity I distinguish among three different kinds of argument, although in practice republicans move freely from one sort to another, depending on the rhetorical context. First, there are arguments that take for granted that achieving a united independent thirty-two-county Irish state has intrinsic value.
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- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008