the orange order

What Americans must remember is the equivalent treaty ending the Thrity Years wasn't signed in Ireland until this last year or so. Both sides have been fight the last campaign of the Thirty Years war for the last 300 plus years.

 

I know enough to know the treaty could have been signed earlier if both sides had been more realistic in their expectations.
From my perspective, they could have ended earlier if DeValera had let US and Canadian Naval and Air Forces use bases in the Republic. Dublin would have gained lease payments from Washington. The US would have bought goods and services from the locals.

Instead Dublin cut off its nose to spite its face. It hewed to such an anti-British policy that it sent condolences to the German embassy when Hitler killed himself. When the rest of Western Europe save Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland was eligable for money for reconstruction from the Marshall Plan, Dublin had to sit on the sidelines sucking its thumb. At least, the four countries listed above made a little bit of money out of the Third Reich.
Keith Robertsson, Squire of Lower Duxis Abbey

 

I believe the sword has two edges. Both sides at various times and for sundry good reasons were unwilling to sit at the table.

This time around:

• the hold of the RCC on Dublin politics was broken.
• The Cold War and Moscows funding had ended. (IRRC, the Provos got their start as the Marxist wing of the IRA.)
• Libya has gotten out of the supplying of Revolutions.
• The French and The Germans were no longer a strategic factor. (And hadn't been for the last 60 years.)
• Other factors too numerous to mention or don't come to mind.

These factors cut the ground from beneath the feet of the "hard" men on both sides.