I always disliked the word Provisional, particularly when it was used to describe the Republican Movement I joined in my teens. It was invariably a term of dismissal, suggesting that we were somehow illegitimate, a lesser republicanism than that which had gone before.
We did not think of ourselves that way.
There was certainly nothing provisional about the commitment expected of those who joined. Stormont was not to be reformed or administered more competently. Partition was not to be made more comfortable. The Northern state, and partition itself, were the problem. We certainly never imagined ourselves becoming their custodians.
As the years have passed, however, I have begun to wonder whether it might be time to resurrect the word.
Our particular brand of republicanism was indeed provisional. Not because the movement itself was temporary, but because almost everything that followed the ceasefire was supposed to be.
The ceasefire was part of a process. The negotiations were part of a process. The Good Friday Agreement was part of a process. Stormont was part of a process. Each accommodation could be justified because none represented the destination. They were stages along a road towards something else: the Irish Republic.
They were provisional.
Almost thirty years later, the institutions remain. The constitutional settlement remains. Partition remains. What has changed most profoundly is Sinn Féin's relationship with them.
Sinn Féin has defeated its constitutional nationalist rivals electorally, first within Northern nationalism and then eventually across much of the island. Yet in doing so it has increasingly occupied the political ground on which those rivals had once stood. Parliamentary politics, ministerial office, power-sharing, consent, cross-border institutions and the gradual persuasion of a Northern majority ceased to be tactical accommodations and became the substance of the strategy itself. Socialism, likewise, has been quietly exchanged for the safer territory of centrist social democracy.
The Provisionals did not defeat constitutional nationalism by demonstrating that it was wrong. They replaced constitutional nationalism and then, gradually, became it.
Perhaps that was the destination for some all along.
That paradox came back to me while reading two recent articles from Comrade Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin's National Chairperson. Read together, they amount to an unintended admission that the Sinn Féin strategy constructed around the Good Friday Agreement has failed to deliver.
That is not the same as saying that the Agreement failed.
From a British, SDLP or unionist perspective, the GFA has largely succeeded in what it was designed to do. It ended an unwinnable conflict, established an agreed system of devolved government and provided constitutional protections for competing identities. Those were considerable achievements.
The peace process succeeded. The provisional Sinn Féin strategy built around it did not.
Republicans were told that the new arrangements were transitional. Stormont could be entered because Stormont would eventually be transcended. Participation did not amount to acceptance of the constitutional status quo because participation itself was the process through which that status quo would be changed.
Kearney's two interventions now expose how difficult that argument has become to sustain.
In one article he describes a North characterised by political instability, chronic underfunding, failing public services, poverty and economic dysfunction. In another he tells us that constitutional change is gathering momentum but requires a new national initiative to advance it.
Sinn Féin has therefore arrived at a peculiar position. The provisional arrangement must be preserved while the transition to the Republic it was supposed to facilitate must apparently be initiated again.
Kearney attributes much of Stormont's dysfunction to the DUP and British government policy. Neither requires a defence from me. They are doing what they have always done. Unionists defend the Union and British governments defend what they perceive to be British interests. Republicans once understood both positions perfectly well.
If Sinn Féin's strategy depended upon the DUP ceasing to behave like the DUP, or upon a British government voluntarily facilitating the end of British sovereignty in Ireland, then the difficulty lies less with either of them than with those who foolishly built a strategy upon such baseless assumptions.
There was a time when republicans pointed to the failure of Stormont as evidence of the failure of partition. Sinn Féin now argues that Stormont must work, that the British government must provide sufficient money to make it work and that unionists must cooperate in making it work.
That is quite a journey for a movement which once regarded Stormont, British sovereignty and unionism not as impediments to the efficient administration of the North but as the political problem itself.
The provisional arrangement has become something Sinn Féin is deeply invested in preserving.
Which leaves a fairly obvious question. What, exactly, remains provisional?
Administering the North
Kearney tells us that constitutional change is on the political horizon, that a paradigm shift has occurred and that momentum for Irish unity is growing.
We have heard versions of this argument for years.
Demographics are changing. Conversations are beginning. Civic nationalism is mobilising. Another roadmap appears. Another commission meets. Another initiative is announced.
Now Kearney proposes a national convention on Irish unity as the next stage of the journey. It might more accurately be described as an attempt to restart a journey that has never really begun.
The constitutional position of the North remains stubbornly where it was in 1922, 1975 and 1998. The North remains within the United Kingdom. Stormont remains a devolved British institution. The British government retains the statutory authority to call a border poll.
Indeed, Kearney acknowledges this difficulty himself. Almost thirty years after the Good Friday Agreement, the Sinn Féin strategy for achieving Irish self-determination still ultimately depends upon a British Secretary of State determining that circumstances exist in which the people of the North may vote to leave the United Kingdom.
Kearney invokes Hume-Adams as a model for what should happen next. But Hume-Adams was the catalyst for a fundamental shift in republican strategy, not British strategy. Nearly four decades later, Sinn Féin is proposing another initiative to begin the constitutional transition which we have repeatedly been assured is already underway.
Advocating for a new initiative is itself an admission that the old provisional initiative has failed.
Holding the office of First Minister represents electoral progress for Sinn Féin. It does not, by itself, represent progress towards an Irish Republic. There is a credible argument that something quite different has happened, Sinn Féin has become increasingly adept at administering the North without becoming demonstrably more successful at ending it.
A movement which once refused to recognise the legitimacy of the Northern state now celebrates occupying its highest political office. Its ministers administer British public policy within the United Kingdom. Its MLAs legislate in institutions established under British law. Its departments depend upon British Treasury funding. Its leadership demands that those institutions be adequately financed.
There is nothing inherently dishonourable about any of this. Government requires compromise, and people are entitled to expect parties seeking office to govern. Pretending though, that it is something else though is dishonourable.
Administering the North is not dismantling it. Making Stormont function is not transcending Stormont. Electoral success within Northern institutions is not constitutional progress towards the Republic.
The Fleadh and the accommodating state
The Fleadh in Belfast offered an almost perfect illustration of that deeper Provo paradox.
It was a magnificent celebration of Irish music and culture, and Belfast's embrace of it demonstrated how immensely Northern society has changed.
But there was an uncomfortable constitutional reality beneath the celebration. The Fleadh took place in the United Kingdom.
Irish identity can now flourish, and the Irish language can flourish in Belfast in much the same way that Scottish and Welsh identities can flourish within the United Kingdom. That may be culturally and politically welcome, but it should not be mistaken for constitutional change.
Culture is not sovereignty. Identity is not constitutional change.
The Fleadh did not demonstrate that the border was disappearing. It demonstrated something potentially more challenging for Sinn Féin strategy: Belfast can become increasingly Irish without becoming any less part of the United Kingdom.
That possibility deserves considerably more attention than Sinn Féin gives it. The Good Friday Agreement may have created a potential route out of the Union. But it may also have made the Union more capable of accommodating Irishness.
That is a profound irony. The republican critique of the old Northern state was that it was inherently hostile to Irish identity.
But the post-Agreement North is different. Irishness has public and legal recognition. Constitutional nationalists dominate the government. North-south institutions exist. The Irish government has an institutionalised relationship with Northern affairs. A constitutional nationalist holds the office of First Minister for the first time.
But the reality remains, the Northern state has not disappeared. It has changed sufficiently to comfortably accommodate much of what constitutional nationalism had demanded of it.
A new Ireland for whom?
There is another absence from Kearney's vision which is equally striking, class politics.
His critique of the North is filled with social concerns, poverty, public services, workers' rights, economic inactivity, housing and the cost of living. These things matter most because they shape people's lives.
Yet when the discussion moves to Irish unity, much of that material analysis disappears. In its place comes the largely undefined promise of a "new Ireland".
A new Ireland for whom?
For a family struggling to pay rent in West Belfast, a pensioner waiting for treatment in Derry or a worker priced out of housing in Dublin, changing the constitutional architecture of the island will not amount to social transformation.
The more important questions concern what that new Ireland would actually be.
Who will own its wealth? Who will be able to afford its houses? What sort of health service will it provide? How will wealth be redistributed? What would prevent a thirty-two-county state from reproducing the inequalities already found on both sides of the border?
These cannot be questions reserved for the day after unity. They determine whether unity offers anything transformative in the first place.
This is where New Sinn Féin has become strangely class blind.
The "new Ireland" conversation is conducted by politicians, academics, business figures, careerists and professional civic campaigners. There are conferences, commissions, reports and carefully managed conversations.
Working-class communities, meanwhile, are viewed as nothing more than secure electoral constituencies rather than the people whose economic interests should define the project itself.
The communities that the peace process has bypassed are being asked whether they support a united Ireland before being told what sort of Ireland they are being asked to support. The constitutional question comes first; its social and economic parameters can apparently be settled afterwards.
For a tradition that once claimed the language of Connolly, that is an extraordinary inversion. The Republic was supposed to be defined by the social and economic interests of its people, not simply by the territory enclosed within its borders.
Connolly's republic was never merely geographical. The purpose was not simply to exchange flags or transfer administrative sovereignty from London to Dublin while leaving existing inequalities intact.
A thirty-two-county state marked by profound inequalities of wealth, housing, aspiration and opportunity would unquestionably constitute a united Ireland.
Whether it would constitute the Republic generations of republicans imagined is another question entirely.
Sinn Féin cannot apply one standard to the North and another to the Ireland it proposes to replace it with. If the North is to be judged according to poverty, wages, housing, health services, economic opportunity and workers' rights, then the proposed new Ireland must face precisely the same test.
It is not enough to tell working-class people that they will live in a different jurisdiction. They are entitled to ask how their lives will be improved.
What remains provisional?
None of this requires a retrospective rejection of the peace process.
The ceasefires were necessary. The abandonment of armed struggle was right. The Good Friday Agreement brought enormous benefits. Participation in the institutions was both inevitable and proper.
But peace and constitutional progress are not the same thing. Accepting the necessity of the peace process does not require us to pretend that everything which followed represents another stage on an inevitable journey towards the Republic.
That is the conversation Sinn Féin appears unable to have with itself.
The question is not whether the peace process was worthwhile. It was. Nor is it whether Irish unity remains desirable. It does.
The question is whether the provisional strategy adopted by the Provisional movement is actually delivering.
Kearney's own arguments bring that contradiction into unusually sharp focus. In one account, functioning power-sharing is "the way forward". In another, the transition to Irish unity must now begin.
If Stormont is the way forward, we are entitled to ask where it is taking us. If the institutions are structurally incapable of delivering for people, we are entitled to ask why their preservation has become a strategic Sinn Féin priority. And if constitutional transition has already acquired the momentum we are repeatedly told it has, we are entitled to wonder why another convention is required to initiate it.
These are the genuine questions republicans should be asking. The answers should concern anyone who still believes that republicanism was supposed to mean something more than acquiring political office within the Northern state.
The less speculative reality may simply be that, after nearly three decades with their snouts in the Stormont trough, the patronage, salaries, status and political infrastructure that come with government have become indispensable to the party itself. What began as a provisional accommodation has become an institution in which Sinn Féin is deeply invested and from which it can no longer easily withdraw. Perhaps that is the real Provo paradox. Somewhere along the journey, the comfort of managing The North quietly replaced the transformation of Ireland as Sinn Féin's real project.
⏩Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was a member of the Republican Movement until he retired in 2006 after 20 years of service. Fiche bhliain ag fás.
