ABSTRACT
The use of language has long been an important tool in the battle for legitimacy fought by the PIRA and its political wing. As Mitchell McLaughlin, a leading Sinn Fe´in politician admitted, from the mid-80s onwards the republican movement intensified the use of positive terms such as ‘‘peace’’ and ‘‘dialogue,’’ aware as they were of the ‘‘symbolic significance of language.’’4 Their renewed concern for this terminology led Sinn Fe´in to produce documents such as A Scenario for Peace (1987), Towards a Peace Strategy (1988), or Towards a Lasting Peace in Ireland (1992). In addition to this the words freedom, justice, and peace featured prominently in Sinn Fe´in’s electoral manifestos and speeches complementing the propaganda of the republican newspaper An Phoblacht, which was also keen on resorting to that kind of language.
