Introduction

Within the republican world view, the Provisional IRA's armed struggle is seen as the contemporary manifestation of the tradition of heroic selfsacrifice inaugurated by Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen in the 1790s, epitomised in the executions of Patrick Pearse and the other leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, and given its definitive expression in the death of Bobby Sands and nine other martyrs of the 1981 H-Block hunger strike. Such acts were not merely instrumental; their true nature can only be properly understood as essentially spiritual offerings whose efficacy must be located on an entirely different ontic plane. Moreover, that the republican movement undertook an armed struggle against the British occupation of Ireland, rather than pursuing some less violent alternative strategy, was simply dictated by the circumstances. Given those circumstances, no other course of action was possible. Finally, it is the Irish people's God-given destiny to achieve the Republic declared in the 1916 Proclamation.