Accepting the Statelet, part II

The Irish Independent reports:

"Another group of senior IRA figures, including one who controls one of its most lucrative rackets, have left the organisation in the North over recognition of the PSNI.

The Tyrone-based senior IRA man runs a tax-exemption certificate racket responsible for raising huge amounts of money for the IRA going back to the Eighties. His is the second departure from the IRA's Army Council this year.

The other is a west Belfast man. Both are former prisoners. Both were appointed to the Army Council last year after Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris had stepped down to facilitate talks on entering government with the DUP."

I wonder why it took so long for (major) splits to show in the republican facade. Also, if people are starting to wear away at the edges, what exactly might they now hope to achieve? It seemed patently and blatently obvious from, I suppose, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that though they somehow presented it as a famous victory on the road to a united Ireland, the peace process is a defeat for the IRA and for Sinn Fein, and not just any old defeat worthy of a scowl and a pint and a muttered "Our Day Will Come," but a defeat that puts the 'RA out of business for good.

I cannot imagine that even an attempt to revive the armed struggle ('Destroying the Statelet') would mean anything other than the Brits wiping them out in a matter of weeks — Tony Blair today has anti-terrorist powers that Thatcher might only have dreamed of. And few nationalists and republicans in Ireland would even accept a return to armed struggle. Think of how bomb scares would feck up the traffic on the way to the shopping malls!

I really do hope that one day in my lifetime there is a united Ireland, as partition sucks and is a reminder of our stupid historical inability to stop fighting over whatever-it-was-we-were-fighting-about. But sometimes no matter how you look at things, you still catch a glimpse of dreary steeples.