SO the Provisional IRA proceeds, with a "peace process" in one hand, and a bomb in the other. Early yesterday morning, on the day after the anniversary of the Warrington bombings, the inhabitants of Wilmslow had their peace shattered.

Mercifully no one was killed. While we cannot know what the Provos intend to do next, this at least was not the "spectacular" the security services had been expecting in the run up to the general election. However, the mangled tracks of the main commuter line between Manchester and London were an eloquent enough reminder, in Mr Gerry Adams's words, that they never really went away.

In London and Dublin, the political reaction was swift and predictable. Mr John Major denounced this "two fingered insult to democracy". Mr Tony Blair condemned the "evil act". The Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, saw the attack an expression of "a politically bankrupt strategy". And the Fianna Fail leader, Mr Bertie Ahern, lamented "politically futile" acts which could only delay any possibility of inclusive political talks.

So that's that, then. Or is it? Has anything really changed, or is likely to change, as a result of yesterday's bombings? The truthful answer is almost certainly not.

Many people will be appalled by such a response. The unionists, for starters. But not just the unionists. Many senior members of the SDLP are less than enamoured of Mr John Hume's continued dialogue with the Sinn Fein president.

IN Britain, as in the Republic, many will see the bombings as further proof, that the "peace process was fundamentally flawed, if not intentionally fraudulent from the outset. The oft repeated position of the British and Irish governments does not actually preclude a decision to pursue a political settlement without Sinn Fein. Indeed, that threat is routinely uttered on occasions such as this.

But to make reality of it would require a change in the established political mindset which is certainly not yet on offer. It would also need to be rooted in a conviction, which neither betrays, that the leaderships of the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP can do serious business with each other.

As the news filtered through from Manchester yesterday morning, a senior British politician instantly decided it was the work of the IRA. Asked what it meant for the future of the "peace process he replied: "It depends. It could either be the precursor to something much worse, or to something very positive." As ever the hope was that this would prove to be one last defiant show of strength before the reinstatement of the ceasefire.

If asked on the record, this politician would be as persuasive in his outrage as any of the above mentioned. He would insist that the continuing republican violence stands in total contradiction of the Sinn Fein leadership's own analysis, as he has come to understand it, that violence will not deliver reward, or produce a settlement.

He readily recognises that the effect of such outrages can only be to dig the unionist parties deeper into the "decommissioning" trench, and render them still less willing to enter dialogue.

But he would probably resist the notion that could be part of the republican masterplan. He agrees the republican leadership is playing a very cynical game. But he prefers to believe, and has almost certainly genuinely come to believe, that that game is being played by the leadership at the expense of the foot soldiers of the republican movement.

In other words, drawing comfort from the general lack of fatalities, and the low level warfare being sustained in comparison with earlier phases of the IRA campaign, he thinks, or at any rate hopes, that the leadership is doing the minimum necessary to pacify its restless troops while plotting a route back into politics.

THE alternative view is that this is a cynical development of the republican movement's essential electoral strategy: nervous of losing the peace vote they "borrowed" last May, and of being held responsible for the resumption of loyalist violence and thus full scale conflict in the North, the Provisionals have fallen back on the ever popular bombing raids in Britain.

The attendant cynical assumption is that, provided small children are not being blown to bits on the streets, many nationalists can contemplate British bombings without feeling any compulsion to challenge their underlying assumptions about the nature of the "peace process".

Cynicism, of course, abounds. But many serious commentators can discern in yesterday's bombings a perfectly rational strategy by which the republican leadership might think to boost Sinn Fein's electoral prospects, and consequently increase pressure on the next British government to lower the threshold for the party's admission to talks.

Sure, the unionists will object. But since when was perceived unionist "intransigence" an obstacle to the republican goal?

This side of the election, Labour and the Conservatives will allow no gap to open between them on the terms for Sinn Fein's entry to talks. If pressed, spokesmen for both will say the effect of the bombing is to increase the need for evidence on the ground to prove the dependability of any second ceasefire. Wilmslow officially reinforces the disposition to resist a fixed point for Sinn Fein entry, and to judge the republicans by "word and deed".

But after Wilmslow, as after Thiepval barracks, as after Manchester, there was no sound of the door closing behind Mr Major or Mr Blair. Britain's alternative prime ministers will hope to be in ceasefire territory after the general election. And the unionist parties are not alone in reckoning that the bitter words of electoral battle will be quickly turned upside down should Mr Hume and Mr Adams find it advantageous to resume their enterprise on the morning after May 1st.