No Belfast Agreement + 9/11 Analogue?

What if there had been no Belfast agreement, and the Irish Republican Army had continued operating into the 21st Century. What if the AQ still initiated a 9/11 analogue, around the same date as OTL, how would the IRA react, and what would be the relationship between the IRA and AQ, both real and imagined ITTL.
 
Firstly, I assume you mean PIRA when you say IRA? The IRA had such a tendency to split, a tendency which was parodied in Monty Python's Life of Brian, that by 1998 there were several organisations which called themselves the IRA

Things would go down hill rapidly for the IRA after an analogue 9/11, they may well lose a lot of their funding which generally came from Irish Americans

However I question whether they and AQ would be linked in peoples minds in any way beyond being terrorists (a word after all that only denotes their primary means of fighting their enemies). PIRA generally went out of their way to avoid causing civilian casualties. Their targets were Police, the Armed Forces and property. They also didn't undertake suicide attacks. AQ on the other hand positively aims to cause civilian casualties and revels in suicide attacks. They are hence quite different organisations

I also doubt that PIRA would even consider an alliance of convenience with AQ against UK. It would be the surest way possible to piss off their main base of support in the US.

There is also one other thing to consider, by the early 90's PIRA had been thoroughly compromised by British agents to the very highest levels. Any cooperation between them and AQ would very rapidly have become known to the British and American Governments
 
PIRA generally went out of their way to avoid causing civilian casualties.

Err. No. The provos were pretty bad in this respect, more extreme republicans were even worse. Loyalists the same. Civilians always bore the brunt during the Troubles.

This question is hard to answer because it relies on interpeting psychology of the people involved - if Belfast had failed, would there have been an intensification of the violence, or would there have been a renewed determination to bring forward an agreement?

IMO if the talks had collapsed, then you would have had it pretty bad for about a year or two, before everyone rallied the troops and sat down again. I'm simplifying, but by the 1990s the problem, in terms of securing a political settlement, was increasingly not republican politicians, but unionist hardliners - republicans had began to change how they percieved the conflict from the early nineties onwards, and became increasingly receptive to some kind of political settlement. So I would hazard that by 9/11 we would have already have had an agreement, or be on the way to one. In the short term, though, I think a failure of Good Friday would have lead to a dip/rise in the violence in the immediate short-term.
 
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I seem to recall that someone posted an article (in Gaelic) on one of the PIRA websites praising the 9/11 attacks. However I'm pretty sure that it was taken down quick when someone higher up realized it was a really bad idea to praise a terrorist attack on your primary funding source...
 
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