As the previous chapter argued, the Irish Provisional republican movement, and more specifically its leadership group based around SF President Gerry Adams and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, has jealously guarded the collective memory of the movement's historical evolution, including in the field of life-writing. This close attention to control of the master narrative of the Provos’ story of the conflict has proceeded in parallel with the importance attached to maintaining the grip of the leading group over the political, strategic and internal processes by which the movement has discussed and interpreted its past. The leadership has also been engaged in a, mostly successful, effort to keep the Provisional movement united behind their contemporary political strategy, despite the highly significant departures from previously orthodox republican beliefs that have characterised the movement's trajectory since the late 1980s. To enumerate only a few of these ideological somersaults can give an indication of how sweeping such change has been, and it can be imagined how disorienting this process has proved for many members and sympathisers of SF and the IRA: in 1986, the movement abandoned its historical policy of abstention from Dáil Éireann (or Leinster House to republicans), the seat of the Republic of Ireland's parliament, which had hitherto been dismissed scornfully as a ‘partitionist assembly’; in 1994, the IRA agreed to call a unilateral ceasefire, so the movement could gain entry to all-party negotiations (the ‘peace process’), thereby abandoning a central demand of the post-1975 period, that the IRA would only suspend its campaign after a British government declaration of intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland; in 1998, SF signed up to the Good Friday Agreement, which effectively entailed a commitment to the principle of majority consent within Northern Ireland for any putative constitutional reunification, and moreover signified a return to an internal Northern Ireland-based devolved assembly (Stormont), albeit with cross-border institutions and, more importantly, SF in a strong electoral position; during the decade after the signing of this Agreement, the Provisional movement also shocked some observers (and many of its own supporters) by endorsing the leadership's arguments in favour of the decommissioning of IRA weaponry (begun tentatively in 2001, and completed in 2005, to the satisfaction of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning), and the movement's support for the Police Service of Northern Ireland (the replacement for the hated RUC).