Two soldiers and a police officer were shot dead by republican groups in the space of 28 hours in early March, in the North of Ireland. This followed a period of less successful attempts to regenerate the “armed struggle”, otherwise dormant for over a decade. In that time the IRA has effectively disbanded and Sinn Fein has become a full participant in the six county executive as junior partner to the hardline loyalist DUP.

The “peace process” has been long and drawn out. It took nearly 15 years from the IRA ceasefire for the devolved Stormont executive to be up and running. The final hurdle was Sinn Fein’s endorsement of the Northern Ireland Police Service and participation in its board. Despite the promise of reform, the decade since the Good Friday Agreement has seen a palpable continuation of the sectarianism that is integral to the partitionist state.

This context has enabled oppositional republican groups to regain their footing after the Real IRA’s Omagh bombing atrocity. Their perspective, of using military force to end British rule, poses a sharp dilemma. How to build up the support base required? This is a quintessentially political task.

The republican revival of the early 1970s resolved this by surfing on a wave of mass nationalist mobilisation for civil rights and against sectarianism and repression. The IRA enjoyed genuine popularity because many saw it as furthering that cause and taking it one step further with a direct challenge to British rule.

Nonetheless it was incapable of military victory against one of the world’s most powerful imperialist states and over the course of two decades this became increasingly apparent. But instead of developing an alternative to militarism in their struggle for Irish self-determination, the republican leadership retreated to a perspective of working within the sectarian northern statelet, as the main bourgeois nationalist parties north and south had long advocated.

One consequence has been that dissident republicans, nurtured on this physical force tradition, still see it as the only way forward.

These shootings are primarily symbolic actions designed to put the RIRA and other armed groups on the map and demonstrate they have organisation, resources and courage. This, it is presumed will win them enough support from among demoralised Sinn Feiners to further rebuild that military action and organisation.

But it is not a political strategy and is doomed to failure. Within the nationalist community, exhausted by years of repression and stress, relatively few see any value in returning to a militarism that failed over two decades of “The Troubles” – although perhaps more now in the consequence of the failings of the Good Friday settlement.

One consequence will be to provoke more repression. This time much less likely to be met by a mass movement capable of resisting it. Another consequence will be to reinforce the rightward trajectory of the “peace process”. We are likely to see a re-run of the 1930s to the 1960s – in which occasional IRA actions were met by imprisonment, isolation and decline, to the point that when the Civil Rights Movement burst on the scene the IRA was on the sidelines and barely capable of responding when state repression was ramped up.

For British socialists the focus must continue to be against this partitionist settlement, for a British withdrawal and for Irish self-determination. We continue to state that it the British occupation and division of Ireland is the root cause of sectarianism, violence and discrimination.

But whilst it is not for us to determine by what means the Irish people should reach these goals, surely a minimum pre-requisite must be to build a force capable of defeating British imperialism. This will involve mass action on a 32 county basis rooted in the working class, with an internationalist perspective that can draw on global solidarity. With the collapse of a militant nationalism in Ireland that is hardly on the agenda in the near future. Unfortunately these latest actions, from organisations who think that it’s OK to shoot pizza delivery workers for “collaborating with imperialism”, will make that task more difficult.