Some years ago, reporting for The Irish Examiner newspaper on a flare-up of deadly violence by small bands of Irish republicans opposed to the peace process, I interviewed Anthony McIntyre, a writer, scholar and former IRA prisoner.

McIntyre, who became notable for his role as a researcher during the Boston College debacle that saw a US university archive raided to grab sealed testimonies from combatants from all sides in the Northern Ireland conflict, was himself, one might say, a “dissident” insofar as he dissented from the orthodoxies of Irish Republicanism.

But he was not a dissident in the same fashion as the so-called “New IRA”, which set off a bomb in Derry last weekend.

I asked McIntyre what he thought the future held for the new IRA splinter groupuscles that had sprung up at that time. He replied: “I don’t think they’re going anywhere—except prison”.

This week McIntyre’s comments seem prescient: not only have police already arrested five men in relation to last Saturday’s bombing (one remains in custody at the time of writing), but he is also right in the modern sense that it is rather hard to run a secret army in today’s world of 360-degree surveillance.

One consequence of that shift is that the terrorism we have seen in Europe in recent years is rather different in character both in its motives and operations from the IRA of yesteryear. Instead of organising as para-armies—hence the term paramilitary—the Islamist-inspired jihadists organise in small cells, and operate as self-radicalised so-called ‘lone wolves’. Like all terrorists, one of their key targets is media presence: they want to be on the front pages. But they also wantonly slaughter civilians, making not even a fig leaf gesture of attacking the forces of the states that they oppose or announcing bomb targets before letting off explosives.

Operational questions aside though, there is another, and more fundamental reason, why Northern Ireland is not yet staring into the abyss.

When the conflict was formally ended in 1998 it was, of course, because republicans, followed by pro-British loyalists, put down their guns and committed to achieving their aims—breaking or cementing the union with Great Britain—through political means alone. This decision was underpinned by two referendums, one in Northern Ireland and one in the Republic, both of which gave overwhelming support for the Belfast Agreement.

The Belfast Agreement, often referred to as the Good Friday Agreement, was never itself meant to solve the national question in Northern Ireland; rather, it was meant to allow some semblance of normality in which civil society would grow. The national question was to be answered at a later date.

Today a lot has changed but there is no popular support for a return to violence among Irish republican voters. Most are happy to live with the status quo: expressions of Irishness are not frowned-upon and while the question of Irish nationhood is off the table in immediate terms, it is catered for with the potential for future referendums on reunification.

More importantly, there is no passive acceptance of violence either: throughout the three-decade long conflict many who opposed the IRA’s tactics found themselves forced into a position where they had to continually speak of the context in which violence occurred because they felt themselves to be under siege from a hostile society. This was built atop the memory of a pre-1969 Northern Ireland that was so utterly ignored by Britain that Catholics were denied civil and political rights through ballot rigging, gerrymandering, and by a state that was at turns passively and actively hostile to them.

That does not sound much like the Northern Ireland of today.

Today, the predominant political question in Northern Ireland is of course Brexit, and this has broken down, more or less, along existing political lines. By-and-large republicans and nationalists oppose Brexit, while loyalists and unionists support it. There are exceptions on both sides—particularly among hard-left republicans who remember Sinn Féin’s long history of euroscepticism and middle-class unionists who see the EU as part of a broader cosmopolitan world—but it is not too crude a measure to say that Brexit has opened old wounds.

However, the threat of customs and excise checks on the border do not resemble the febrile situation Northern Ireland was in during the 1960s in the lead up to the ‘Troubles’: anti-Catholic discrimination in housing and jobs, civil rights marches brutally suppressed, loyalist mobs burning out Catholic housing estates, a devolved government completely opposed to any expression of Irishness, and an utterly indifferent British government that barely even noticed as violence stalked the streets.

There are past precedents for micro-IRAs causing havoc, but the IRA that we tend to speak of today, the Provisional IRA, operated in and was sustained by historical circumstances that no longer obtain. During the 1950s and early 1960s the rump IRA conducted ‘Operation Harvest’, better known as the ‘border campaign’. This series of operations was so disastrous that it effectively brought an end to the IRA entirely. By the time the conflict in Northern Ireland erupted the IRA was a shell of an organisation with few members and fewer arms, and its political wing was more interested in international socialism than in national liberation. In 1969, the IRA scrambled to reassemble—and split in the process—but reassemble it did. It reassembled, however, in an era that today resembles nothing so much as pre-history. The Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) pro-Brexit rhetoric may send shivers down republican spines, but no-one seriously believes that there will be any return to the Orange State of old. For a start, the DUP is not actually demanding any such thing, and demographics make it impossible in any case.

None of this is to say that the situation in Northern Ireland can be ignored; the problems are real. Power-sharing has apparently failed. With no local governing assembly in place for the last two years both sides are now attempting to make tactical use of the interregnum: in light of Brexit, Sinn Féin is pushing hard for a so-called ‘border poll’ referendum on reunification. The DUP, meanwhile, is revelling in playing the traditional role of the Irish minority wagging the British dog, throwing a spanner in the works of any Brexit compromise, as well as ‘governing’ Northern Ireland from afar via its confidence and supply agreement with Britain’s ruling Conservative party.

In addition, political divisions remain very real, and while overt sectarianism is on the decline there is little real sign of rapprochement.

Finally, while the various micro-IRAs are hardly to be compared to the paramilitaries of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s, they cannot be entirely ignored. Derry, in particular, is home to a, relatively speaking, significant republican splinter movement. The reasons for this have not, so far as I have read or heard, been adequately explained, but for the moment the term ‘relative’ is key.

It should of course be stressed that these small groups of masked men are not utter non-entities: armed opportunists can always make a nuisance of themselves, even a deadly one, but full-scale conflicts emerge in very different circumstances to those we find in Northern Ireland today.