Northern Ireland: Hope and History

After three decades of violence that has seen more than 3,000 dead as well as several false starts towards peace, there is now a glimmer of hope in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) has at last taken the plunge on disarming itself. On October 23 the group announced that it had begun getting rid of illegally held weapons in order to “save the peace process”. The IRA has long resisted surrendering its weapons to the British government, which retained control over the northern six counties of Ireland after the southern 26 counties broke from British rule in 1921. And though the peace process was encouraged with the IRA’s second ceasefire in 1997, the future of the organisation’s weaponry remained a dominant and unresolved issue.