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
2 - Blood Sacrifice and Destiny: Republican Metaphysics and the IRA's Armed Struggle
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 am dying … because what is lost in here is lost for the Republic and those wretched oppressed whom I am deeply proud to know as the ‘risen people’ … I may die, but the Republic of 1916 will never die. Onward to the Republic and liberation of our people.
(Bobby Sands, on the first day of his hunger strike in the Maze Prison, 1 March 1981)Introduction
Within the republican world view, the Provisional IRA's armed struggle is seen as the contemporary manifestation of the tradition of heroic selfsacrifice inaugurated by Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen in the 1790s, epitomised in the executions of Patrick Pearse and the other leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, and given its definitive expression in the death of Bobby Sands and nine other martyrs of the 1981 H-Block hunger strike. Such acts were not merely instrumental; their true nature can only be properly understood as essentially spiritual offerings whose efficacy must be located on an entirely different ontic plane. Moreover, that the republican movement undertook an armed struggle against the British occupation of Ireland, rather than pursuing some less violent alternative strategy, was simply dictated by the circumstances. Given those circumstances, no other course of action was possible. Finally, it is the Irish people's God-given destiny to achieve the Republic declared in the 1916 Proclamation.
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- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008