The pace of events since the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 has been staggering. The nature and speed of these developments have frequently been confusing and erratic, but the pictures of smiling Sinn Féin Executive members seated around the Cabinet table at Stormont alongside their Unionist and SDLP colleagues marks the distance travelled by contemporary republican politicians. Throughout this process a range of commentators, as well as political opponents, have attempted to explain republicanism's apparent transformation from revolutionary armed movement to semi-constitutional party. Many unionists have understandably remained sceptical of the sincerity of this Damascene conversion, while republican critics see the new departure as the abandonment of the movement's traditional goals. Brendan Hughes, a former IRA commander in Belfast, argues that there has been a fundamental shift in Provisional republicanism and that the only real beneficiary of the armed struggle has been the nationalist middle class, which has reaped the rewards of the Good Friday Agreement.

Academic commentators reflect this debate about a possible structural shift within republicanism. For example, Jennifer Todd stresses that Provisionalism has not been transformed into constitutional nationalism, but rather the Sinn Féin leadership has extended the ‘ideological repertoire’ of republicanism by subordinating traditional long-term goals, which are unachievable in the immediate term, to a more practical agenda of ‘radical egalitarian democratic transformist principles’. However, her ‘transformist principles’ – which include cultural equality, radical reform of the RUC, withdrawal of the British Army and the strengthening of the North–South dimension of the Belfast Agreement – do mark a significant scaling down of republican demands and a redefinition of the scale of the republican project as it has been generally understood during the last thirty years. Henry Patterson also agrees that there has been change, but he sees the ‘historical achievement’ of the Provisional leadership as its ability to reconcile most republican activists ‘to a settlement which contains nothing that can realistically be seen as even “transitional” to a united Ireland’.