The first appeared in the Sunday Independent, in a report of allegations that high-rankling members of the Provisionals have been buying expensive real estate. One Provo allegedly paid euro 600,000 for a four-bedroom house near Dublin, though, according to the story, he has no visible means of support. The story goes on to relate how members of the Provo leadership, including Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Pat Doherty and others, have purchased expensive vacation homes in Donegal.

The second story appeared in The Blanket, a website for dissident republicans and others, and a venue for all who have criticisms of the current strategy of the Provisional leadership. It is also one of the few places in the media where any kind of informed debate about what is happening is given an airing. It is the text of a speech given by Terry Harkins, a member of the Ard Comhairle of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, at the unveiling of a plaque to two members of the Irish National Liberation Army (the armed wing of the IRSP) who were shot dead “on active service,” as the phrase goes. The speech, a vintage piece of leftist babble, could have been spoken at any time in the last 30 -– nay, 40 years -- during which ideologues with a smattering of Marxism tried to marry it to a fundamentalist form of Irish nationalism.

The speech represents the fantasy world of aging lefties who still do not recognize the transformation of Ireland from a poor country into a modern European state. The story about the Provo leaders’ real estate bonanza is a product of that new Ireland. Their flight into middle-class affluence is the reality.

The Sunday Independent published a picture of Adams’s Donegal villa, purchased, the story says, with money from his book deals. It overlooks a beautiful vista, which includes Tory Island. By a coincidence, the plaque to the two dead INLA men is in Adams’s home district of Ballymurphy, far away from such bucolic bliss. Both Mickey Kearney and Paddy “Bo” Campbell came from the Ballymurphy-Springhill estates, and Kearney died on its streets on Feb. 17, 1987. Campbell, the son of a leading member of the Belfast Provisional IRA, had his throat cut in a fight with Dublin drug dealers.

The holiday homes and the sad little memorial represent the divergent paths taken by sections of the modern republican movement. One led to political success and relative prosperity, the other to an obscure memorial and a dull speech.

Harkin, the speaker, is a veteran of the IRSP/INLA. He was there when it consumed itself in fratricidal violence, though to listen to his eulogy of Kearney it is as if this never happened. Harkin had the amazing temerity to stand in front of a crowd in 2003 and proclaim the lives of Kearney and Campbell as models for modern youth to follow. He is like one of those Japanese soldiers left behind on a remote Pacific island after the end of the World War II who comes charging out of the jungle 20 years later to attack a busload of U.S. eco-tourists.

Harkin begins by lamenting modern Ireland and the “youth of today, spoon fed on a continuous diet of wall-to-wall trash TV and designer music to deaden the soul.” They have “swallowed whole the manufactured cardboard heroes” and prefer thinking about Westlife than the “army that tied James Connolly to a chair and shot him.” Harkin does not remind readers that the INL, would force suspected informers to sit on hot stoves to get them to confess before shooting them. He tells us that the youth of today “would be wise to emulate both Patrick and Mickey, look beyond the hype and have something more to believe in.”

I remember in Belfast back in March of 1987, musing on the INLA feud -– which had just come to a blood-dripping finale -- with a friend who asked me in tones of incredulity: “Why would anyone want to join the INLA in 1987?” That was 16 years ago, and now, in 2003, someone can still stand up on a podium and recommend that young people join the INLA.

Harkin lies about how Kearney came to earn his plaque.

“Mickey died at the hands of fellow Irishmen who were duped into doing the work of the British imperialist war-machine and trying to wipe out the Republican Socialist Movement,” he said. In actual fact, Kearney was shot dead by Gerard Steenson, former commander of the INLA in Belfast and one of the most feared gunmen in the republican movement. It is utterly self-deluding for Harkin or anyone else to claim that Steenson and his colleagues were ”dupes” of Britain. In the course of the dispute that led to the feud, Kearney had his nose bitten off during a fight between the two factions when they were still in jail. That’s what happens when you have something to believe in, I suppose. The truth is, the so-called Republican Socialist Movement wiped itself out.

Harkin’s speech is a pathetic example of that old recyclable republican model, the Romantic-Ireland’s-Dead-and-Gone speech, except now it’s with Mickey Kearney and Bo Campbell in the grave while all around the youth of today dance to the music of Westlife, indifferent to the clarion call of the INLA to go out and kill your former comrades in the name of Ireland.

The alternative to this dead-end street, at least for a few, is the road that leads to vacation homes in beautiful places and well-paid jobs in various parliaments, as represented by the current success of the upper echelons of the Provisionals, which now constitutes a leadership class. Traditionally, every previous generation of Irish revolutionaries has taken this road taken. It seems to me that if the youth of Ireland are inclined to follow any republican’s example it will be that of Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. Romantic Ireland’s not dead and gone, it has just retired to Donegal.