Declaration defines SF moment of truth

The republican leadership spent much of 1998 recalling the ideals of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen of 1798.

One does not have to accept the republican leadership's professions of non-sectarianism at face value - the last time Gerry Adams talked of his Protestant brothers and sisters was the day the IRA bombed Canary Wharf - to acknowledge that the Sinn Fein political class has been trying throughout most of the 1990s to move away from an armed campaign which was inevitably fuelled, at least in part, by the most visceral forms of sectarianism and ethnic rage.

There was, of course, more to it than that. The key republican TUAS document of 1994 - whether we say TUAS stood for "totally unarmed strategy" or, perhaps more credibly, the "Tactical Use of Armed Struggle" - is absolutely clear on this point.

The document refers approvingly to the attitudes of the Taoiseach, the SDLP leadership and President Clinton. It argues the case for a new political alignment - republicans linking up with these elements to "create a substantial political momentum which will considerably advance the struggle at this time". As Eamon Mallie and David McKit trick say in The Fight for Peace (1996): "In other words, the IRA campaign was to be brought to an end because republicans were not strong enough on their own to achieve their objective, but believed progress could be made through the fashioning of a new nationalist alliance".

It was precisely this alliance which seemed to disintegrate when the Hillsborough Declaration aligned Dublin and President Clinton against Sinn Fein on the issue of decommissioning. The senior republican, Brian Keenan, in his Easter speech attacking the Dublin Government, appeared to glory in the prospect of a return to the isolation which had prompted the TUAS strategy in the first place.

This raises a few questions - how keen are other republican leaders to go down the same route? Mr Keenan himself must have been aware of the significant deficiencies in the pre-TUAS strategy - otherwise he would hardly have gone along with the leadership over the last five years. "We have been on our own before, and, if we have to be on our own again, we will be on our own again," said Mr Keenan. But is this a real option? To reject the peace process at this stage plunges everybody in the North, not least republicans, back into conflict of immense futility: more particularly, it could be driven only by the most base and elemental emotions of sectarian hatred. This may seem to be a rather dramatic way of putting it. After all, until recently many republicans gave every impression of believing that they stood to gain by an obdurate stance on decommissioning. If the agreement fell on that issue, then, it was reasoned, David Trimble would be blamed - and, without any necessity for a return to war, the two governments would impose a joint authority-type solution.

But this assumption has been widely challenged by the Hills borough intergovernmental demarche; decommissioning, it has been ruled, is an obligation under the agreement. There is a clear implication that Trimble cannot logically be made to shoulder the blame for any collapse caused by the republican movement's continued refusal to come to terms with this unpalatable reality.

Sending this Anglo-Irish message does not guarantee "success" or an IRA decommissioning gesture of any sort. Far from it.

Although all the Easter rhetoric does not make IRA decommissioning more unlikely, there remains substantial resistance to any gesture on the arms issue at the republican grass roots.

But the two governments have created the only conditions in which decommissioning or putting arms "beyond use" is likely to come about. No political group, least of all Sinn Fein, will take a painful, potentially divisive decision while it believes a refusal to do so is actually objectively in its interest.

The tactical rationalisation for stubborn non-compliance with the Belfast Agreement's provisions on decommissioning has been stripped away, leaving only one real logical basis for rejecting the Hillsborough document - republican fundamentalism.

But we have surely come too far for that. Recently, another critic of the Blair-Ahern text, Mr Danny Morrison, has been eloquently pointing out that unionism should take comfort from the fact that republicans now accept the legitimacy of unionism.

He has a point - but does not go far enough.

In his articles in the early 1980s, Mr Morrison defended armed struggle on quite specific grounds. The various political possibilities which so entrance some Sinn Fein leaders today - becoming the majority party of nationalism within the North, gaining influence in Leinster House, even becoming the government in the South - he explicitly dismissed as inadequate alternatives to physical force. As long as Britain upheld the consent principle in the North, the core of the problem remained unresolved.

Nobody within mainstream republicanism argues like this today, even if some are coy about accepting the principle of consent. Mr Morrison has himself moved on: he now appears to accept a political project he once rejected, but somehow this change has not been internalised.

So let us take a deep breath and remind ourselves of this fact: most of the prominent people who articulated a particular case for armed struggle in the 1980s no longer believe in the case they then expressed. Of course, such developments have been clouded in ambiguity, as is traditionally the case with Irish republicanism.

AS LATE as March 1929, Eamon de Valera described the parliament he had entered two years previously as an illegal assembly; within three years he was, of course, to form the government of this "illegal" assembly.

Seventy years later, in March 1999, Gerry Adams declared that Northern Ireland, even post-agreement Northern Ireland, was illegitimate - despite the fact that the Irish Government, in the new international agreement appended in the Belfast Agreement, accepts the legitimacy of a United Kingdom which includes Northern Ireland so long as a majority in the North support that.

Mr Adams, in other moods, talks as if he was the guardian of the spirit of the agreement, especially when he claims a Sinn Fein right to sit in government. While he speaks for a movement which denies legitimacy to the Good Friday Agreement as a peace settlement, Mr Adams is clearly operating a political double standard.

But perhaps he should consider one interesting development. After long years of somewhat unhealthy Lemass worship, de Valera is coming back into fashion with scholars. In particular, there is a feeling that his credentials as a democrat - unproven, to say the least, in the early 1920s - were proven decisively and creditably in the 1930s.

If Gerry Adams wishes to be seen in a similar light he has only to grasp the opportunity the Hillsborough Declaration allows him to enter the government of Northern Ireland.

His own Easter speech rather implies that he understands this. The dissident republicans, after all, have a good line in cruel jokes about Armani suits or designating the Provisional IRA as "Stormont death squads", but they have a lot less to offer than the radical republicans de Valera saw off in the 1930s; and Peadar O'Donnell and his friends did not compete against the backdrop of Omagh.

In London, on March 1st, 1995, Gerry Adams declared that the decommissioning of arms would happen at the end of negotiations, not the beginning. The moment of truth he predicted has arrived.

Paul Bew is professor of Irish politics at Queen's University