WHY don't we face facts this morning? We in the Republic are not just back to the beginning, about the North. We're further back than the beginning.
The consequences of letting the Orangemen through in Portadown must have been immediately evident, last week, to a mind trained to see consequences. At least I assume that's why the President, Mrs Robinson, broke down in public when she heard that news.
The Examiner was there. She couldn't hide it: she was devastated. And she is a person who has kept her control through all kinds of tests. She was opening a new residence for the Simon Community in Cork last Thursday when the news about the RUC change of policy was passed to her. When her speech touched on the North, she started to cry.
I don't blame her. I only wish that British decision makers realise how significant it is when a person such as we know the President to be is so hurt by what they do. They might pause to wonder - why did she cry. What hopes were dashed by what they did. They cannot call her a bigot. They cannot call those of us here who are shocked and wounded, bigots.
And she didn't know, I presume, at that time, an aspect of the decision that is of the utmost significance to us. The people who made it, in London and Belfast, didn't bother to tell us. Never mind ask us - they didn't even tell us.
Forget the Anglo Irish this and the Downing Street that and the Framework the other. We were not even told, as a courtesy, about the decision that would shift the burden of violence from the majority to the minority community. We were under the impression that a role for us as guarantors of the well being of that community was enshrined at formal, treaty level. When the British government decided it was more politic to insult the minority than to outrage the majority, they insulted us, too.
"We have to get round the table in a meaningful way," Dick Spring said yesterday. What table?
THE Killyhevlin car bombers are "back safely in Mr Bruton's Republic", Peter Robinson tells us. The Republic is full of peace loving people who actually believe that one of the ways a society ensures peace is by having an impartial police force that is directed by politicians to behave impartially.
We in the south have the most urgent interest in a peaceful island. We are imprisoned by violence in the North, in our psyches and in ordinary moving about. My little niece's bus home from the Donegal Gaeltacht will take seven hours instead of four, because it must avoid the North. My aunt went on a Glens of Ant rim weekend nine days ago. She'll never go north again, now.
We're in this together. Proximity cuts both ways, Mr Robinson. I will do everything I can to stamp out the IRA on my side of the Border. Are you and your majority community leader friends doing everything you can to run a peaceful society on your side? Or are the political leaders on your side perfectly willing to risk such real peace as there was in your province for the sake of a symbolic reassertion of Orange dominance?
North and South move apart again, now, physically, intellectually and politically. The car bomb brings us back to a familiar abnormality.
The politicians who made the decision about Portadown may say that that decision shouldn't have led to a car bomb that it was only about a harmless old march, and if it were not for a pathology inherent in the Catholic community it wouldn't have led to a car bomb.
But I am not so cynical as to believe they're that stupid. I think they chose the "here we go again" scenario. I'm not so cynical as to believe that they set it up. They were well able to stop their own coal miners massing with intent to commit a civil disturbance. Well able. They brought in a battery of legislation specifically to prevent their citizens combining in a threatening manner.
But I'm not so cynical as to believe that they don't use their powers and skills when it comes to Orange marches because they don't really want to, and they're not sure the RUC really wants to, either.
I never thought in that way, until now. Conspiracy theories were for crazy northerners. I believed as a matter of course in the probity of establishments. I thought the British establishment was candid with the Irish establishment.
Establishments lie, all the time, on matters of self interest. I wasn't surprised when the present British government lied to Ian Paisley, to take an example, about talking to the IRA. But I thought their self interest included trustworthy dealings with their opposite numbers in the Government of the Republic of Ireland.
Now I see that the sour and bloodstained and demeaning old saw is true: we cannot trust the British. This doesn't mean that I trust the enemies of the British one whit more than I did. I don't believe what Sinn Fein was hinting yesterday - that British intelligence planted the Killyhevlin bomb.
But I do not, now, trust the British.
Car bombs would not matter if there were a determined and united political and diplomatic front in motion designed to outflank whoever uses them or any other form of murder weapon. If we and the British (and the EU, and the Clinton administration) were working together on a peace making agenda, the news from the North would be bad, but not terrible. There would be hope. But we, so closely concerned with the British in the matter, have been most humiliatingly excluded by them.
As I say, they didn't even tell us about the cave in at Portadown. They didn't even line us up to help with the fall out. Much less tell us in advance. Much less discuss it with us in advance.
I WENT up to the Dail the day Albert Reynolds came home waving his piece of paper. I joined in the heartfelt applause when he came into the chamber. I believe in diplomatic instruments like the Downing Street Declaration.
Sorry - I used to believe in those things. The next Irish politician who brings me back news of a peace process from Westminster will have a harder time impressing me. I see no way around the facts.
The RUC almost held firm to the ideal of a dispassionate and disinterested civil power. It chose dishonour, or it was chosen for it. The usual anti nationalist commentators have tried out a line to the effect that since there is no discrimination against Catholics in jobs and housing - so they say, anyway Catholics aren't really insulted at Portadown. But they are. An insult was knowingly offered to Catholics. In their identity.
The powers that be in Northern Ireland chose to do that. It is their province, and they can do what they want. But when they wound their Catholic citizens, they wound the island. Not the Catholics on the island - the peace lovers.