Two contrasting speeches, both by British prime ministers but made twenty-five years apart, highlight the stark nature of the transformation of Irish republicanism from violent revolutionaries to reformist politicians. On 12 October 1984, Margaret Thatcher, surrounded by security officers, declared to the Conservative Party faithful, ‘this government will not weaken. This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail.’ The challenge she was referring to was that posed by the IRA's armed campaign and Sinn Féin's anti-system politics. She viewed republicans as posing an unambiguous threat to the legitimate democratic political order. The reason for a particularly visible security presence that day was that she was speaking just hours after the IRA had come close to assassinating her at the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the annual Conservative Party Conference. Some days later Thatcher reiterated this same sentiment even more strongly, declaring that she viewed the bombing as an attempt to ‘destroy the fundamental freedom that is the birth right of every British citizen: freedom, justice, democracy’. This was not the only time the IRA came close to assassinating a British prime minister and in 1991, after John Major's close escape from an IRA mortar bomb, he too decried republicanism. He viewed them with ‘contempt’ and declared that republicans ‘have demonstrably failed and every time they even contemplate joining the political process they are rebuffed’.

By 2010, a British prime minister was making a very different speech. Instead of accusing republicans of trying to destroy democracy, Gordon Brown was now praising their co-leadership of Northern Ireland's power-sharing executive and their constructive role in the new Northern Irish democracy. After securing support for the Hillsborough Castle Agreement which enabled the devolution of policing and justice powers, a key milestone in the consolidation of the peace process, Brown stated that ‘this is the last chapter of a long and troubled story and the beginning of a new chapter after decades of violence, years of talks, weeks of stalemate’. This speech came sixteen years after the IRA initially declared what was to become a lasting ceasefire and twelve years after Sinn Féin accepted the Belfast Agreement peace treaty. For many, as for Gordon Brown, this represented the completion of the implementation of the peace process, which brought to an end the twenty-five-year conflict in which the IRA killed over 1,700 people.