It has seemed right, before we turn away from this place in which we have laid the mortal remains of the IRA’s Army Council, that one among us should, in the name of all, speak the praise of that valiant body, and endeavour to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around its grave.

Marxists predict the end of the state through a process of withering away. No Republican ever said out loud that they looked forward to the day when the IRA’s Army Council would wither away, even if that has been the leadership’s strategy from the late 1980s. That is the meaning of today’s announcement from the Independent Monitoring Commission saying the IRA has relinquished its terrorist structures and the leadership necessary to wage war

There are three major milestones in the ending of the IRA’s campaign. The first was the 1987 ambush at Loughgall when nine IRA members were executed by the British Army. This had a profoundly demoralising effect in an organisation with an active membership of under 500 and was the high point in Thatcher’s campaign to wipe out entire IRA units. The waves of mass activity associated with the Hunger Strikes and Republican supporters were asked to do nothing but vote several times each election day, drink in Provie social clubs and cheer the increasingly rare occasions a British soldier was killed.

A rare military success for the IRA demonstrated the utterly futility of its strategy. The bombing of London’s Baltic Exchange in 1993 caused in the region of £700 million worth of damage. The 10 000 other bombs which the IRA had detonated in the north of Ireland cost the British Exchequer £600 million which cast an unflattering light on the military value of the “economic” bombing campaign. Thisn could only make sense to an organisation which did did see shop, factory or office workers as potential allies in a national liberation struggle. A former drinking companion of mine who went on to be a Sinn Fein councillor and a candidate in those unwinnable seats where he had a good chance of getting shot if too man of the electorate recognised him used to smash windows during riots explaining “this is costing the Brits money.” High theory rarely distracted him. Wiser heads in the organisation worked out that their chances of pulling off spectaculars like that at a time when they were infiltrated by British spies at every level were little better than zero.

Despite what apologists for imperialism say the IRA was not a sectarian organisation. With a limited number of exceptions it did not directly target Protestant civilians. However any campaign that relies on using large amounts of explosives in urban areas will eventually lead to massacres of the innocent. There were a number of these over the years from Bloody Friday to Frizzells fish shop on the Shankill Road in Belfast. This latter was an attempt to kill the UDA’s leadership which was supposed to be meeting in the room above. It killed nine innocent Saturday shoppers. The IRA would not have commissioned a similar operation in a Catholic area. By this point in 1993 even the most loyal Republicans were questioning the value of a patently unwinnable and defeated military campaign against a much larger, better equipped enemy with far superior intelligence gathering capacity. This lesson has been lost on all the smaller groups which have split without drawing a single political conclusion from what went wrong.

Having giving up on armed struggle the Republicans capitulated tenaciously to every demand from London, Washington and the Unionist far right. They used to argue that the British were a colonial occupying power. Now they go crying to Gordon Brown when Peter Robinson is horrid to them. They haven’t worked out that it’s the unionist base that Robinson leads that is required for maintaining the colony. This is a British imposed dispensation in which they are the subordinates. At one time they knew that the unionist veto on self-determination was anti-democratic. Now they burble on about “parity of esteem for both traditions” and sit in government with creationist education ministers and climate change denying environment ministers.

Every month brings a new humiliation. I mentioned over the summer that former IRA members were stopping riots in protest against sectarian loyalist parades. At one time they would have been organising the defiant youth. Now they are ancillary cops.

The IRA’s armed struggle demanded enormous sacrifices of the comrades who participated in it and they were admired for it.  On joining the Army they were told to expect either an early death or a long time in prison and that was the truth. But for whole communities they were the only authority that mattered and the only protection available. That’s why there was never any shortage of safe houses and why the funerals were big. Republican monuments are shocking things. They remind us that most of those who died in arms against British imperialism were in their early 20s. The oldest of the Hunger Strikers was barely 30. Those who served years or decades in prison are in middle age now. They die younger, drink more and are scarred from what they endured. All this in order that Martin Mc Guinness can be photographed with George Bush and share power with the DUP.

So with a salute to the comrades’ courage let’s hope that this marks the end of Irish Republicanism’s grip over the next generation to radicalise. The fight for self-determination begins with the fight against the Good Friday Agreement and the weapons are class struggle and mass action.