Dr Tony Craig March 2013
[email protected] Monitoring the Peace? : Northern Ireland’s 1975 ceasefire incident centres and the politicisation of Sinn Féin. During the Provisional IRA’s (PIRA) 1975 ceasefire, two different sets of incident centres were established across Northern Ireland in order to monitor and avert escalation of violence between Republicans and Security Forces. While one group of these offices were run by the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) and administered by clerks in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, very quickly Sinn Féin (taking advantage of their decriminalisation in 1974) established their own incident centres to coordinate their communication with the government. This article argues that the establishment of the Sinn Féin incident centres set a precedent for the future political activity of the Provisional Republican Movement; that their activity during the 1975 ceasefire played an important formative role in the evolution of the group’s political strategy; and that this experience, acquired from the work done during the 1975 truce, was of far greater influence than is appreciated in current accounts. The period surrounding the PIRA’s 1975 ceasefire has recently become the site of a large amount of new research due in equal measure to the availability of new archive resources1 as well as the rich comparisons that can be drawn between this failed ceasefire and the PIRA’s later attempts in 1994 and 1996.2 The emphasis of the new studies has often been to look in detail at the talks between the British Government