Who Blinked First? Debating the Origins of the Northern Irish Peace Process

Abstract On 31 August 1994, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) announced a ceasefire. Over the previous two-and-a-half decades, it had waged western Europe’s most lethal and enduring insurgency, claiming the lives of over 1,700 people. The IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ had been a key driver of ‘the Troubles’ that beset Northern Ireland; its decision to end the campaign of violence was likewise integral to an emergent peace process. Almost from the moment it was declared, commentators and historians have debated the IRA ceasefire. Why did it happen? What did it mean? Which side had blinked first in the long war between the British government and the IRA? In seeking to answer such questions, an emerging trend within the historiography aims to advance an understanding of the conflict that foregrounds IRA flexibility, as juxtaposed to British intransigence. On this reading, it was the British refusal to engage in dialogue and offer the IRA an ‘honourable’ settlement that prevented a peaceful resolution as far back as the early 1970s; conversely, it was the British decision to shift course in the late 1980s that paved the way for peace. The problem, however, is that such a narrative represents a fundamental misreading of what happened. For this reason, the present article examines several recent, important contributions to the literature on the IRA and the peace process, as part of an effort to revisit the question of why it was that the IRA decided eventually to end its self-declared ‘long war’.