Anthony McIntyre and Ed Moloney must be closet astrologers, as their timing defies explanation. Moloney brought out his updated biography of Ian Paisley just a few days before the big man announced his retirement. Moloney joked at the time: “He called and asked me, ‘When would suit you?’ ”

Last week McIntyre trumped him with a tome entitled The Death of Irish Republicanism, published as the Irish and British governments commissioned a report from the International Monitoring Commission (IMC), designed to ascertain if the IRA army council is still in existence. The fact that they need to ask, and need three weeks to consider the evidence and weigh up the reported sightings, speaks for itself.

A few years ago, the two governments wouldn’t have needed to ponder these things. A steady stream of bombings, shootings and attacks would have reminded them of the continued existence of the organisation — one that for 30 years was the greatest single threat to the security of the British state.

McIntyre, a former IRA commander who served 18 years for murder and then did a PhD in republican history, is right. The Provisional IRA — and the army council that plotted its campaign — is on its death bed. It may thrash around like a headless chicken for a few years, but it is past reviving. If the IRA ever re-emerges, it will be a new organisation with new people.

Nowadays, senior police officers such as assistant chief constable Peter Sheridan, the PSNI officer in charge of intelligence and analysis, believe the council is still around but seldom meets, and is no longer replacing members who leave. As Martin McGuinness put it on Wednesday: “The IRA have clearly gone off the stage since 2005, but attempts are still made by some people to drag them back on, and I think that’s silly.”

Sinn Fein is currently marketing a T-shirt with a rising phoenix symbolising the IRA, and the slogan: “1968-2008 The Struggle Continues”. The message is inescapable: give or take a few months, this marks the lifespan of the Provisional IRA.

Former members such as McIntyre are left to count the cost. He points out that the organisation is shuffling off the stage and into history without achieving any of its objectives. “The public stance was that, in Charlie Haughey’s phrase, Northern Ireland was a ‘failed political entity’, but the Provos proved the Northern Ireland state was, in fact, a viable entity. It was the Provisional project that wasn’t viable,” he says.

McIntyre’s book is a collection of articles he wrote between the signing of the Good Friday Agreement — which he says was fatal to the republican project — and 2007. A fascinating chronicle, it is full of interviews with former prisoners, political insights and aphorisms.

“Republicanism is effectively dead. It is dead as a strategy that can deliver anything. It can’t cope with the principle of consent, it can’t out-manoeuvre it and it can’t overcome it, so it has had to reconcile itself with the British ground rules,” he told me. “Republicanism is just an aspiration — that’s what it has been reduced to. Although there are still republicans, we are just the survivors of the wreck.”

In retrospect, McIntyre believes that the Provisional IRA, founded in 1969, bore signs of compromise from the start. He found that older republicans, the pre-69ers, were “amazed and disappointed at the people joining”, and said that the Provos were “a completely different phenomenon from anything that was continued from 1916”.

I was reminded of the words of Peadar O’Donnell in the 1920s: “We don’t have an IRA battalion in Belfast, we have a battalion of armed Catholics.” McIntyre argues that the IRA was mainly a northern phenomenon, and not ideologically purist. “They weren’t a response to the British being in Ireland, but a response to how the British behaved there. All the British needed to do to end the campaign was to change their behaviour. But they didn’t have to leave to get a deal.”

This is an analysis borne out by the sales blurb for the T-shirt, which talks of “the struggle from the days of the civil rights movement to the present,” but never mentions British withdrawal.

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