Some years ago I was informed by a southern relative that people in the south, “Don’t mind talking about the IRA, but not the murderers.” Here, meaning the old IRA and the Provisional IRA respectively. My Dad also told me on a number of occasions he had been exasperatedly asked by southerners, What are youse doing in the North?” To which he had responded: “We’re carrying on your history.”

Both Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar were in agreement throughout the recent election campaign that Sinn Féin was ‘not a normal, democratic party’ due to its legacy of violence. One can only hope, however wishfully, that someone will remind them of these words in August next year in Béal na Bláth, Co. Cork, in continuation of the hundred year battle between each of the main parties to claim Michael Collins as their own, made all the more prescient by the Big Fellow’s centenary.

Ruairí Ó Murchú, newly elected TD for Louth, drew the line of ascendancy from the Troubles of 1916-1923 and those of 1968-1998. He said that, ‘They are no different. The difficulty in Ireland was occupation, it was partition, it was discrimination, and this led to a situation that we all preferred wouldn’t have happened.” His former party leader and constituency predecessor, Gerry Adams formerly stated in the Dáil that the only difference between the old IRA and the Provisional IRA “was time.”

This is a very easy case to make. The Provisional armed campaign is still within living memory; because of conflict – involving multiple actors – a third of people in Northern Ireland today qualify as victims according to one measure. The War of Independence, meanwhile, is two or three generations removed from our era and thus romanticism has set in and begun to take hold.

The difference between the two incarnations of the IRA go beyond time, though, and what makes this romantic attitude all the more hypocritical is that the old IRA were the aggressors of the War of Independence. The very first act of violence in 1919 at Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary, was committed by the IRA, and acts of republican violence outnumbered British violence each of the three years of the conflict by a figure of double. The most conclusive study of this came from the late Canadian historian Peter Hart in his 2005 book The IRA at War 1916-1923.

The success of the original IRA was in the (kangaroo) ‘court of public opinion’, where they backed Britain into a corner in such a way that however its forces responded they would have lost. If the British side responded proportionately they would have been seen as tyrants, and yet if they responded with leniency they would have been seen as weak and, therefore, all that was needed was one last push before victory would ultimately be won.

Conversations of contrast took place at the centenary of the Easter Rising, where everyone was keen to establish that they are the true heirs to the ‘men of 1916’. But when one considers this dispassionately, a case can be made that the modern equivalent of the IRB, ICA, and the Irish Volunteers who stormed the GPO, are the dissident republicans. A small handful of poorly trained, poorly equipped vagabonds with as little plan for governance as they have chance of success.

Furthermore, to the point about old IRA aggression, one has to recognise that the position of a northern Catholic in 1968 was far more unliveable than that of southerners in 1916. In fact, in many ways it was the North that suffered most in the years of revolution and civil war, particularly in regards to relative population. Few areas saw any actual fighting, and those were Cork, Dublin, Newry, Armagh, and Belfast.

There also seems to be some misguided notion, just as RTÉ once suggested that each political jurisdiction was also subject to a different climate, that the Troubles were located entirely within the boundaries of Northern Ireland. Collection boxes for republican organisations being passed around was a familiar sight in southern pubs; each county of Ireland had its own Provisional brigade. In fact, the Provisional IRA were probably better represented across Ireland than were the old IRA; and the graffiti that adorns the walls of Newry, Derry, and Belfast was just as common to the southern side of Carlingford Lough.

What began with the Proclamation of 1916 ended with the Good Friday Agreement, and everything that happened in between was a succession of interrelated events. In just the same way that the Second World War was a consequence of the First. For anyone in the South not to recognise this maintains an ignorance of a history that belongs to them too.