Beginning of the End of Northern Ireland?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

It would be incredibly sad to see the UK break up.
However, if the democratic will of the people of Northern Ireland is for Irish Unification, then it would be more damaging, in the long run, to deny those wishes.

Well it wouldn't be the breakup of the UK though as Northern Ireland is a fairly minor part. Not like Scottish independence would be. I'm a Scottish unionist who's pro-Irish unification and I don't think that's an extremely uncommon position.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

This is going to be a hugely hot and controversial take, but in a way I think that the Good Friday Agreement was a mistake. You do not negotiate with terrorists. It would have been vastly preferrable for the IRA to have been utterly crushed than for the GFA to happen.

Except the GFA was the defeat of the IRA. It was more or less what the UK government had agreed to at Sunningdale in 1973, 25 years previously. The IRA armed campaign during the intervening 25 years was to force a united Ireland by collapsing the British state in Northern Ireland militarily; the reason Adams, McGuinness and co. abandoned the armed campaign was because they saw that was impossible to achieve. So the Provisional IRA decommissioned and went into electoral politics.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

This is going to be a hugely hot and controversial take, but in a way I think that the Good Friday Agreement was a mistake. You do not negotiate with terrorists. It would have been vastly preferrable for the IRA to have been utterly crushed than for the GFA to happen.

Except the GFA was the defeat of the IRA. It was more or less what the UK government had agreed to at Sunningdale in 1973, 25 years previously. The IRA armed campaign during the intervening 25 years was to force a united Ireland by collapsing the British state in Northern Ireland militarily; the reason Adams, McGuinness and co. abandoned the armed campaign was because they saw that was impossible to achieve. So the Provisional IRA decommissioned and went into electoral politics.

Ok, I guess I'll slightly change that to "unconditional surrender from the IRA" (as opposed to the "negotiated treaty" that was the GFA)

But my point is that they surrendered in exchange for an agreement that the British government had already made with nationalists and moderate unionists decades ago...

[Statilius the Epicurean]

This is going to be a hugely hot and controversial take, but in a way I think that the Good Friday Agreement was a mistake. You do not negotiate with terrorists. It would have been vastly preferrable for the IRA to have been utterly crushed than for the GFA to happen.

Except the GFA was the defeat of the IRA. It was more or less what the UK government had agreed to at Sunningdale in 1973, 25 years previously. The IRA armed campaign during the intervening 25 years was to force a united Ireland by collapsing the British state in Northern Ireland militarily; the reason Adams, McGuinness and co. abandoned the armed campaign was because they saw that was impossible to achieve. So the Provisional IRA decommissioned and went into electoral politics.

Ok, I guess I'll slightly change that to "unconditional surrender from the IRA" (as opposed to the "negotiated treaty" that was the GFA)

It was unionists, not the IRA, that caused the failure of Sunningdale
But my point is that they surrendered in exchange for an agreement that the British government had already made with nationalists and moderate unionists decades ago...

What relevance does that have to the fact that Provisional IRA acceptance of the GFA and its decommissioning was an admission of defeat?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Because this pre-supposes that Sunningdale was in any way sustainable at that moment in History.

No? The point about Sunningdale is that the Provisional IRA retreated from an armed campaign to unite Ireland by force to surrendering its arms and accepting a power sharing agreement under the British state that had been brokered with moderate nationalists and unionists decades ago. It is a curious "stalemate" where one side surrenders all of its objectives and weapons to the other side that keeps all of theirs.

(And yeah, the same applies to the loyalist groups post-GFA. They're mostly fat old men who call themselves 'community activists' and complain on TV/to Arlene Foster and can't do much else.)