THE PROVISIONAL IRA'S ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE BRITISH Prime Minister and Cabinet at Brighton on 12 October 1984, represents the most dramatic move to date in a reputedly 20-year strategy of inducing the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland and leave Ireland to the Irish. Where nonviolent Irish nationalists have aimed, most notably through the New Ireland Forum Report published in May 1984, to persuade the British that the 1920 constitutional settlement dividing Ireland is inherently unstable and must be dismantled, the Provisional IRA has no faith in this course of action. The British, they calculate, will be persuaded not by the force of argument but by the argument of force. In this they can claim, with some justification, to be the true heirs of the Easter Rising of 1916. At that time the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which was to become the basic document of Irish republicanism, declared ‘… the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible’. Since the 1916 Proclamation was ratified by the first subsequent meeting of elected representatives of the Irish people, the first Dáil Eireann, in 1919, representing virtually all but the Ulster unionist minority, and since the right and the aspiration to Irish unity have been reaffirmed by all non-unionist Irish parties ever since, it must be a truth universally acknowledged that the division of Ireland is unjust and undemocratic and that the reunification of the country is the rightful aspiration of the great majority of its people.
THE DISCURSIVE FORMULATION OF BREXIT: DECISION, OPPORTUNITY AND NEEDFUL AGREEMENT