The Joint Declaration by the Irish and British governments on the future of Northern Ireland may or may not be a thing of substance. Both sides of the case are argued in the current issue of Hot Press, by The Whole Hog and by Eamonn McCann respectively. But either way I am convinced that there is now within Sinn Féin a very strong body of opinion that it is time for the IRA to lay down their arms – and that, incontrovertibly, is a thing of palpable substance. One of the clear intentions behind the Declaration was to make it easier for those voices within the Republican movement to find sufficiently broad favour that the option of a non-violent political way forward would hold sway. But I hope that the question of whether or not the Declaration goes far enough can ultimately be seen to be irrelevant by people within Sinn Féin. Because, the nuances of John Major and Albert Reynolds’ piece of craftwork notwithstanding, the political process really does offer those who aspire to a better future, free from British and Unionist domination but also from the threat of ongoing brutalisation and murder, their best hope.

It is not hard to imagine the difficulties which that conclusion will confront many of those who have given their lives to the Republican struggle over the past twenty-five years with. In these pages not so long ago, Eamonn McCann summed it up in a single simple haunting question: what was it all for? The thousands of people on both sides of the conflict who were murdered, killed and bombed into oblivion. The families that were destroyed. The activists who were tortured and imprisoned. The devastation that was visited on the lives and loves of ordinary people, Catholic and Protestant, and on British working class citizens of any and every religious persuasion and none, whose children were misfortunate enough to be posted to Northern Ireland and who got on the wrong end of a sniper’s bullet or a car bomb. All that twenty-five year long legacy of grief is desperately hard to live with if the political change, on the surface at least, seems far short of the aspirations of those who have been on the frontline.

But to allow that perspective to dictate will make Sinn Féin, and the people they represent, prisoners of the past to an even greater extent than has been true for so long of Republicans and Loyalists alike in the North.

In time the challenge will be presented to the Unionist community: where are the leaders of generosity, vision and courage within your ranks who can extend the hand of friendship, so that people on both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland might move towards a future based on real equality and mutual respect? But it will be presented with all the greater moral force and authority if those on the Republican side have already taken that great and brave leap into the unknown.

Take a deep breath . . .

• Niall Stokes