Sands’s victory was crucial in convincing the Provisionals that there was a constituency out there that could provide them with an electoral base. It set the movement on a course that would eventually transform them from the most militant faction of Irish republicanism in history into the potential voice of Northern Ireland nationalism.
It is worth remembering how much has changed in the years since the early 1990s in order to judge how important for Sinn Fein and the Provisional movement in general is the upcoming election for a new Northern Ireland assembly.
Less than a decade ago, the Provisional republican movement was reeling from a series of disasters. In the fall of 1993 it was a movement in crisis. It had killed 10 people — nine of them Protestant — in a premature explosion on the loyalist Shankill Road, and loyalists had struck back in revenge, shooting seven dead in an attack on a bar in Greysteel, Co. Derry. Northern Ireland seemed about to be consumed in another cycle of tit-for-tat sectarian killings. Politically speaking, things were also pretty dire. Sinn Fein’s president, Gerry Adams, had lost his parliamentary seat in the general election of the year before. Sinn Fein was spending most of its time apologizing for Provisional IRA “mistakes” which were claiming the lives of ordinary civilians. A tentative peace process was struggling to find its feet, with talks between Adams and the leader of the Social and Democratic Labor Party John Hume. But the Shankill bombing and the loyalist reaction to it seemed certain to crush any hopes that the talks might come to anything.
In fact, the disasters of those years, if anything, spurred on the efforts of Adams and Martin McGuinness, who were seeking to bring the armed struggle to an end. They realized that political violence would never achieve what they were seeking.
This election will determine whether they will now reap the political dividend promised by those such as Adams who engineered that dramatic transformation. Chief among those dividends involves replacing the SDLP as the major voice of Northern Irish nationalism. If Sinn Fein manages to achieve this, then it will be seen as the most convincing validation that the political strategy of Adams and McGuinness was right.
Known as the TUAS — meaning “totally” or “tactically” unarmed strategy, depending on your sources — it involved the gradual abandonment of physical force, in favor of politics. This was an extremely risky departure for the Provisional movement, since it had earned its reputation through its supposedly unbending commitment to physical force and its often-repeated promise never to end it until the British had declared their intention to leave Northern Ireland. Supporters needed to be convinced that the movement could gain its aims through politics rather than the gun.
Nearly 10 years later, the British are still in Northern Ireland, and there is no immediate sign that they are leaving or that the Provisionals’ traditional goal of a united Ireland is now a real possibility.
However, there have been many compensations. Since their engagement in the peace process in 1994, the Provisionals have won a solid political base in the North, and are building one south of the Irish border. A series of British concessions, thanks to the peace process, has kept the movement together, and avoided any serious splits. Electoral success, meanwhile, has given Sinn Fein a political platform. Sinn Fein has also managed to hold together the broad nationalist front involving the SDLP, the Dublin government and Irish America, which it created back in 1994, as a means of putting pressure on the British.
If Sinn Fein does become the dominant nationalist party in the North, it would strengthen the hand of Adams and the reformers for a final move against the IRA to ensure that it is put out to pasture. This would be necessary if Sinn Fein harbors any hope for reconstructing a devolved government in alliance with the Ulster Unionists (assuming they are in a position to do so).
There is, of course, no guarantee that Sinn Fein will succeed in replacing in the SDLP. The week before the election, opinion polls showed that the SDLP was still running a few percentage points ahead of the republicans.
Failure to overtake the SDLP would stun Sinn Fein, and might even call into question the strategy of Adams and McGuinness. However, it would almost certainly be only a temporary setback. Whatever the outcome of next Wednesday’s vote, the Provisionals are now inexorably set on a political course, wherever it may lead them.