Coming weeks will test if SF's pledge on Mitchell can be taken at face value

AT FACE value the Sinn Fein leader, Mr Gerry Adams made an interesting and potentially ground breaking comments about the Mitchell Report yesterday. The great difficulty in Northern Ireland is that nothing much is accepted at face value.

Sinn Fein, said Mr Adams, would sign up to the six Mitchell principles if all other parties, including the British government, would do likewise.

Mr Adams issued a statement to that effect last night, and repeated it a number of times on BBC2. "How many times do you want me to tell you, Jim?" he said to BBC political editor, Jim Dougal.

But did Mr Adams mean precisely what he said yesterday, or was there a Jesuitical sub text?

That was the question being asked in British and Irish government circles, and by unionists and other interested parties last night.

Given the absolute benefit of the doubt not a commodity in great supply in the North Mr Adams's remarks are very important. They denote a willingness to accept principles that are anathema to republicans.

Take the fourth principle, for example. It demands from all parties to talks a "total and absolute commitment to renounce for themselves, and to oppose any effort by others, to use force, or threaten to use force, to influence the course or the outcome of all party negotiations".

At face value, that principle is tantamount to a repudiation of violence, including IRA violence. No republican whether on the military or political wing of that ideology can be expected to make such a commitment lightly.

So, are Mr Adams and Sinn Fein distancing themselves from the IRA? Hardly. Or are they engaging in chicanery planning to falsely sign up to Mitchell with their fingers crossed, so to speak? Perhaps, but there is hardly much advantage in such an enterprise.

The Ulster Unionist leader Mr David Trimble, is suspicious that this is a "play acting exercise" designed to get Sinn Fein into all party talks in the absence of an IRA ceasefire.

But surely Mr Adams and everyone else in the republican movement knows from the two governments that without an IRA ceasefire they won't be at the talks.

So, is this commitment to Mitchell designed to allow Mr Adams and all his senior colleagues to turn up at the talks venue on June 10th (as they did during the "proximity talks" at Stormont) only to be barred at the gates again, because the IRA ceasefire has not been reinstated?

But a politician with Mr Adams's nous surely realises that there is a law of diminishing returns in pulling the same stunt twice.

The fact is Sinn Fein, for all its manoeuvrings and jockeying for position, must realise that unless there is an IRA ceasefire it will not be at talks, irrespective of whether or not it signs up to Mitchell.

There have been a lot of ambiguous signals emanating from republican sources recently. Whether the so called hawks or doves are in the ascendant is any body's guess at this stage. But what is at least clear now is that Sinn Fein will sign up to the Mitchell Six. And that is movement.

And it is also surely clear that Sinn Fein, while asserting that it is a political party in its own right, will not break what Sir Patrick Mayhew describes as its "inextricable link" with the IRA.

So, therefore, the unanswered "question is Sinn Fein, as Mr Trimble suspects, merely "playacting"? Or is Sinn Fein, with the backing of a forthcoming IRA ceasefire, about to take its chances with the talks, thus putting it up to Mr Trimble and his fellow unionists?

The coming weeks will prove whether Mr Adams's comments should be taken at face value.