is zero-sum game of political violence is what brought about the two peace efforts prior to 1998, but it is necessary to explore the events that lead up to the need for peace and answer the question of why they collapsed.
             In 1916 Patrick Pearse ignited the flame of the republican movement. On April 24, 1916, Pearse and his supporters rallied in Dublin and declared Ireland an independent and sovereign state, free from British rule. His vision of a free Irish Republic unleashed a wave of nationalism that escalated when the leaders of what would be known as the Easter Rising were arrested and executed. The Sinn Fein (the political wing of the republican movement) based their political agenda around achieving this goal and adopted the idea of Ireland as a sovereign and independent republic. In 1918 the Sinn Fein boycotted the seats they had won in the Irish wing of the Westminster parliament, expressing that they did not believe in a foreign parliament guiding Irish interests. Instead, they formed the Assembly of Ireland in Dublin and took an oath of allegiance to the Republic. What Pearse had started in 1916 festered over the next three years and came to a head as the first shots of the Anglo-Irish War were fired on January 21, 1919. This is the point in history when the republican movement first adopted violence as a means of achieving its political goals. The IRA would evolve out of the Irish Volunteers and would serve as the primary military organization of the republican cause. In the eyes of the English and unionists, the IRA was an illegitimate terrorist organization by the English, and their cause was nothing more than a criminal conspiracy.
             The violence that has loomed over Northern Ireland for the past eighty years has its origins in these events. It is here that the history of distrust concerning the control of Northern Ireland politics begins. In response to the IRA violence that targeted unionists and the soldie...