So now we hear that this State is going to crack down ruthlessly on the IRA elements responsible for the Omagh outrage just days after it has opened the prison gates to release members of an organisation which has yet to live up to a single one of the Mitchell Principles.
Allowing for the fiction that Sinn Fein and the IRA are two distinct and separate organisations, a figleaf falsehood that permitted Sinn Fein to sign the Mitchell Principles, the fact remains that the IRA did not sign them.
Not an ounce of Semtex was handed over; not a detonator; we didn't even get what we most wanted to hear - a declaration that the war was over.
A prudent silence; because the war wasn't over. Omagh is proof of that - though proof remained before our eyes day after day after day, with punishment beatings, knee-cappings and even the occasional murder. Why should the IRA surrender its weapons?
No one was compelling it to. Its prisoners were being released anyway, its political expression, Sinn Fein, was able to attract one-fifth of the overall vote in the North, and constitutional leaders throughout nationalist Ireland remained uninsistent that it sever its links with paramilitaries.
Throughout this peace process the only sensitivity which nationalist Ireland discussed seriously was the sensitivity of the Sinn Fein leadership.
The great lie, promulgated throughout nationalist Ireland to the point of McCarthyite intimidation, was that those who questioned the viability of the peace process were stooges of the British establishment, of MI5, of the unionist parties.
We said, and we were right, that the McGuinness/Adams wing of Sinn Fein/IRA could not deliver the entire IRA into this process. Propitiating the entire movement must mean propitiating its unpropitiable extreme.
And that was not possible. It was weakness to the point of imbecility to be releasing IRA prisoners without a handover of Semtex, weakness to the point of moral delinquency for the British to be dismantling their anti-terrorist laws before the war was done, weakness to the point of criminal lunacy that a tariff of three years maximum in jail be established for all offenders who belonged to organisations which embarked on ceasefires.
How consoling the authors of the Omagh bombing might find it to know that all they have to do now for their operatives to meet the three-year rule is for the Real IRA to declare a ceasefire.
And those who don't like it can then have a split and start again, courtesy of whatever Semtex is handed over to the New Real IRA from the Old Real IRA, which of course got it from the Old Provisional IRA, from which throughout this peace process nobody in power insisted: you get nothing until you hand over your high explosives. Omagh has paid the price; and so, in time, might we all.
We have invented a near zerogravity criminal code in which offences may occur almost without consequence.
Is it surprising that the Nazi wing of Sinn Fein/IRA has felt liberated from the most rudimentary of civilising influences, a fear of what the State might do to you, when the State has assured them that it will do virtually nothing, no matter what terrorists now do?
At worst, the State will invite them to spend three years in workfree, self-catering, free-association accommodation, followed by freedom, with a couple of thousand quid to spend.
What is past bearing, what the relatives of the dead of Omagh, what the hundreds of maimed and mutilated of the town and beyond the town must sooner or later digest is that the man who almost certainly made the Omagh bomb is well-known to the security forces.
He would now be in jail in Britain but for the diseased pedantry of the Irish courts system which, amid much triumphalism, secured his freedom on foot of some trifling technical deficiency in his arrest warrant. And, instead of the State trying to re-arrest him, he was let go, as if some referee had blown a final whistle and the match was over.
It wasn't. We know from past experience that the match is never over until the extremists are behind lock and key and are doomed to remain there while war continues. We have our history spread before us, yet in our late 20th century liberal wisdom we have chosen to ignore it. But it is there; and the lesson we have chosen to ignore is the lesson which must now be applied.
Internment without trial in the Twenty-six Counties defeated the IRA in the 1920s, the 1940s and the 1950s; only when political will was weak was it not tried in the 1970s, with consequences we know all too well.
Internment will not merely put the Nazi wing behind bars; it will also serve to strengthen the conciliatory Adams/McGuinness wing in their arguments with dissidents inside the larger Sinn Fein/IRA family. The deal they got is good; none better is available, and they must know that this State will not succumb or buckle further than it has already.
The deeply-flawed agreement of Good Friday, the day of Golgotha, has now yielded the Golgotha of Omagh. The time for words from our elected leaders is past; and the day of deeds is come.