It is a sorry day indeed, writes Kevin Myers, when a former Taoiseach can approvingly quote the words of that ghastly old savage Joe Cahill: "We won the war; now let us win the peace."
Or perhaps Albert Reynolds was being ironic, though he's always given the impression that he thought irony, like Martin Ferrous, was a branch of metallurgy.
Contrary to what the priest Des Wilson said at the Cahill funeral, Joe Cahill and the IRA didn't resort to war only when all other options were closed. War has always been the option of first resort for the IRA, from the 1916 Rising, in which not a single leader had ever stood for election (Sean MacBride alone had contested an election, but had no part in calling the Rising) through to 1970, and the quarter-century of unspeakable atrocities that followed.
What made IRA wars possible was bad history. Burden yourself with that, and you burden yourself with a recurring nightmare. And the myth that the IRA won the Anglo-Irish conflict of 1916-21 is one the most crushing burdens that Irish nationalist historiography has placed on future generations.
If the British government of 1914 had been told that in 1924 a new state, Northern Ireland, would remain in the United Kingdom, and another new state, the Irish Free State, would be outside the UK, but its ports would remain British, it would be within the Commonwealth with a governor-general, its currency would remain linked to sterling, and it would have no navy, would the British government have regarded that as a satisfactory future outcome? Why, it would have assumed you were talking about Home Rule.
But if Patrick Pearse had been told in 1914 that within 10 years his country would have been ravaged by war in which thousands died and its infrastructure was ruined, with a governor-general, an oath of allegiance to the crown and a government which would enjoy only limited sovereignty over its seas and none at all over either its currency or most of Ulster, would he have said, "Yes please, I'll go for that"? You're damned sure he wouldn't.
Yet ask any student: who won the Anglo-Irish conflict of 1916-1921? The answer will be the IRA. This is the great lie that has underwritten every single resurgence of pagan violence ever since, even though the British (through the Black and Tans, whose pensions were paid by the new Irish government) achieved most of their war aims.
As it was in the past, so was it this time around. British special forces and intelligence services had made the IRA campaign ineffective across almost all of Northern Ireland, except in South Armagh. A porous Border, and an abject refusal by repeated Irish governments to take the necessary action to close the Republic down as an operational base for terrorism, meant that the IRA remained unbeatable in the Keady-Newry-Crossmaglen salient. But the IRA could not have won a war from South Armagh alone; and it was reduced to killing the odd Protestant who sold an apple to a cousin of a man who once supplied dental drills to a chap who'd extracted a rotten tooth from a Chelsea Pensioner. Which would be hailed by those gibbering half-wits in An Phoblacht as a crushing blow at the heart of the British establishment.
Joe Cahill was central to various IRA campaigns over 60 years. He was a war-as-first-option man, a cretinous loon who adored violence. He left the IRA in the 1960s because of its tepid embrace of half-constitutional politics. He helped form the Provisional movement - with the assistance of Fianna Fáil ministers in Dublin - because it promised an unbroken diet of violence. God knows how many people had their lives cut short by this jovial imbecile, but his deal with the barking madman in Libya meant it was very, very many.
It passes all belief - and is simply beyond parody - that an Irish government unconditionally released him from prison before time because of a "heart condition", enabling him to return to what he did best: running a murder machine. But it gets better. He recently sued the British government for the asbestosis which he contracted while working in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in the 1950s. What's this? Harland and Wolff, the company that supposedly didn't employ Catholics? Or maybe it employed Catholics who'd murdered a fellow Catholic, which is precisely what Joe Cahill did when he gunned down Constable Murphy, a father of 10, in 1942. But he let Tom Williams, who hadn't fired a shot, take the rap and be hanged. A fine fellow, Joe Cahill, rather like the real, uncaught Birmingham bombers of a later generation, who - naturally - answered to his command.
Of course, the British government stumped up on the asbestosis claim, as it always does these days whenever an itchy Shinner paw stretches out. So once again, the British had won the military war and lost the political one, as the creation of the post-war narrative was surrendered to the Shinners and their revolting ballad-singing toadies. Meanwhile the IRA has repeatedly violated the spirit and the letter of the Belfast Agreement. Nuala O'Loan, the police ombudsman, declared that the PSNI raid on the Shinner offices in Stormont - triggered by the IRA's electronic intelligence operations against the Irish, British and US governments, and which brought the Executive crashing down - was "reasonable, proportionate and legal." The punishment on Sinn Féin-IRA for this? None. Just more British government support for that odious orgy of self-satisfied nationalist preening, the West Belfast Festival.