Miranda Alison
Gender, Small Arms and the Northern Ireland Conflict
9
beyond use’ in each act and therefore the IICD has also been restricted in terms of the details it
can provide, although de Chastelain has said that the most recent act involved a ‘considerably
larger’ amount of weapons than the two previous acts of decommissioning and included ‘light,
medium and heavy ordnance and associated munitions’, and ‘automatic weapons, ammunition,
explosives and explosive material.’
27
The IICD has an inventory of the arms concerned, but will
not disclose it without IRA agreement.
Kris Brown and Corinna Hauswedell argue that although disarmament of warring groups in the
context of attempts to end conflicts has been crucial, sometimes as part of demobilisation and
reintegration programmes, ‘the heightened status it has received in Northern Ireland, where it
became the core issue of dispute between rival sectarian groups during an eight-year period, is
virtually unprecedented.’ The highly politicised nature of debates on disarmament has been
unfortunate and unhelpful for the building of a stable peace yet has served the strategic interests
of both unionists and republicans at various points. Unionists have used the issue to apply
pressure on republicans and ‘compensate for political setbacks and failures incurred on other
issues’ while republicans have used it as a bargaining chip to push for desired political
concessions.
28
As the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has highlighted,
disarmament (and demobilisation and reintegration) often has ‘a symbolic and political
importance beyond the sum of its parts.’
29
This has certainly been the case in Northern Ireland,
where ‘the symbolic value of guns surpasses their inherent military potential’ and ‘the issue of
paramilitary arms… serv[ed] as the political foundation upon which both conflicting parties
anchored their positions’.
30
For republicans, ‘the symbolic importance of retaining weaponry
served as political ballast, its purpose being to steady the Republican movement while it
jettisoned much of its traditional ideology.’
31
Arms, then, became a symbol of continuity during a
highly uncertain period of great change. Nevertheless, the eventual efforts of republicans at
decommissioning have been spurred by their commitment to the survival of the new political
institutions. For loyalists, the traditional construction of the purpose of their paramilitarism as
being to provide defence for the loyalist community, as part of their oft-mentioned ‘siege
mentality’, has reinforced their determination to refuse to decommission weapons in the context
of their weaker and less consistent commitment to the new political order, a crisis of identity and
perception of deepening political and socio-economic exclusion.
32
Despite the participation of
women in Northern Ireland in the transport, concealment and even usage of arms during the
‘Troubles’ (discussed in a following section), a masculinist identity associated with paramilitarist
gun possession and usage is as visible there as in other countries. As Wendy Cukier emphasises,
Convention