There has been a great deal of both academic and popular literature devoted to the involvement of the Provisional republican movement in the peace process since the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire of 1994. This attention has been concentrated upon the ideological and strategic transformation wrought by the leadership group, based around the Sinn Féin (SF) President since 1983, Gerry Adams. This chapter analyses a hitherto neglected dimension of these developments: the significance of political memoir-writing by Provisionals, which has provided both an insight into the movement's role and objectives during the prosecution of its ‘armed struggle’ in Northern Ireland, as well as its efforts to control the narrative telling of the conflict. Moreover, the memoirs studied here, particularly those authored by leadership figures, often seek to transmit and interpret the dramatic changes that the movement has lived through, in order to make sense of this evolution for both an internal constituency of activists and sympathisers, and an external audience of sometimes sceptical or hostile onlookers. The formation and shaping of the republican movement's collective memory of the Troubles and its self-presentation owe a good deal to the memoir-writing of some of its key personnel, not least Gerry Adams.

Some authors who have worked on the collective memory of the republican movement have argued that ‘personal memoirs’ may help us to understand the motivations and the ‘narrative interpretations’ that members have developed to explain their beliefs and actions to themselves and others. However, very often these arguments stress the unreliability of such sources, and the ‘mechanisms of denial’ that characterise them; Rogelio Alonso, for instance, makes the case for ‘the existence of a group mentality [amongst Irish republicans] which results in the ideological convergence of its members and their adherence to an accepted “official explanation” for their conduct.’ This chapter seeks to argue that the memoir-writing of key exemplary individuals has been of critical significance in constructing this ideological convergence, and shaping the ‘official explanation’ of the movement's past. It is also the case, however, that such a convergence, inspired as it was by the perceived requirement for unity and self-discipline within the republican movement, has at times ‘masked underlying division’.