What goes around comes around as Provisional IRA’s heirs defeat Gilmore

THERE is a symmetry to the departure of Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, the highest-ranking alumni of the former Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party, The Workers’ Party, Democratic Left tradition, after a devastating defeat at the hands of Sinn Féin at the polls.

There is no division in Irish politics that runs more bitterly than that between the political heirs of the Official and Provisional IRAs’ split in 1969-70.

Much of this, if remembered at all, is recalled as only a curiosity. But for stalwarts who started in politics in the 1970s, like Gilmore or Gerry Adams, none of the irony will be lost. Having first split, and then feuded, about who would man the barricades and about the ideological underpinning of those barricades, their final, decisive struggle was fought snout to snout over the trough of government, on an island irretrievably portioned until a majority in Northern Ireland agrees otherwise. The ultimate spoil now is neither ending partition nor capitalism. It is operating the system both promised to bury.