Introduction

The fundamental republican conviction that the establishment of a united independent Ireland free from British control is a value worth dying (and killing) for is represented in various diverse media, including funeral orations, wall murals, political speeches, books, newspaper articles, prison journals, T-shirts, songs, websites, coffee mugs, commemorations and posters, as well as in the actions of republicans themselves, including political activism, hunger strikes and bombings. These disparate expressions do not add up to an explicit, systematic defence of the core republican conviction. Nor has the republican movement produced such a defence. Yet in the absence of such a defence, the moral justification of the IRA's armed struggle appears to be precariously ungrounded.

My aim in this chapter is to bring together and critically examine arguments that attempt to establish a right of the Irish people to a united independent thirty-two-county Irish state. For clarity I distinguish among three different kinds of argument, although in practice republicans move freely from one sort to another, depending on the rhetorical context. First, there are arguments that take for granted that achieving a united independent thirty-two-county Irish state has intrinsic value.