ABSTRACT
As a general rule the opportunity for men with guns to murder for the cause does not exist in efficient, brutal, authoritarian states. Only in Yugoslavia, where a relatively open internal society on top of old ethnic flaw lines, might there now be room for the gunmen. The strongest single attraction of the Republican movement increasingly became the obvious hypocrisy of the legitimate institutions. In the academic concern with myths and realities, the nature of legitimacy, and the problems and probes of analysis, it is easy to forget that the subject is real. It is in fact the events in the North that give the present IRA a legitimacy related neither to the old rituals nor the old attitudes. Among the men of the 1940s in the north, one of the most prominent, and visible, was Joe Cahill, who succeeded Billy McKee in March 1971 as C/O of the Belfast Brigade.
