Sectarianism Revisited: The Provisional IRA Campaign in a Border Region of Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article revisits the debate, hosted by this journal in the 1990s, on whether the Provisional IRA campaign was sectarian. In the light of current debates about how Northern Ireland deals with its past, it challenges the analysis that emphasises the non-sectarian ideology of republicanism and ignores the effects of IRA violence. It uses research on the IRA campaign in Fermanagh and south Tyrone to argue that the campaign was unavoidably sectarian but rejects current attempts to label it a form of “ethnic cleansing.”