Sixty years ago this morning, Ireland awoke to find that overnight Eamon de Valera had made the IRA an illegal organisation in Ireland and had banned the Bodenstown march. On Monday last, Ireland had the pleasure of seeing massed ranks of youngsters in paramilitary attire parading at Bodenstown, and on Tuesday of hearing the Taoiseach effectively declare that the IRA need not disarm before Sinn Fein's entry to the Northern Ireland Executive. The British prime minister has been saying the same. Northern Ireland's unionists were receiving the message, loud and clear from both governments. Give in. Guess what? They won't.
They are truly brilliant people, these Sinn Feiners. They have made an extraordinary journey in less than a decade, without ever renouncing the IRA or its deeds, from being the grubby political face of sectarian fascist violence to having their current political demands endorsed by the democratically elected leaders of both Ireland and Britain. Yet, far from the IRA abandoning the bullet, it is killing people almost weekly, though not, of course, always with bullets. A knife - or knives - did for poor Eamon Collins, and a shotgun was used in the murder of Paul Downey, whose half-naked body was found in South Armagh last week.
Brighton bomber
The British government, stern and unbending in the defence of its servants, responded to the attempted murder of its agent Martin McGartland by releasing the Brighton bomber Patrick Magee. Martin Ferris, convicted gun-runner and now elected councillor in Tralee and Kerry, told his audience at Bodenstown that loyalist violence had spread terror to nationalist communities in the North, and 10 people had been killed so far.
Ten people? Do the 29 dead of the Omagh bombings not count? Eamon Collins? Paul Bull Downey? Brendan Speedy Fegen? Apparently not; the violence in the North is now mono-dimensional, emanating from loyalists alone. And it certainly is emanating from that quarter, as only a fool would deny.
We do not seem to have learnt the basic lesson of the recent European elections. Protestant opposition to the actual implementation and interpretation of the Good Friday Agreement is such that the Unionist Party now polls at the same level as Sinn Fein. Far from Bob McCartney constituting a non-sectarian, anti-Good Friday alternative to Trimble's party, he has effectively been rejected by unionist people. Instead, the dominant voice within the that community is, once again, steeped in the anti-popery of Ian Paisley.
Mitchell Principles
And now Bertie Ahern, following the lead of Tony Blair, and almost beyond belief, is declaring that institutions in the North must come into existence before decommissioning occurs. So what happened to the Mitchell Principles? They were the very basis which made the talks possible; they were the reassurance to the unionist community that its representatives would not find themselves in power with the political wing of an armed, terrorist organisation - one that continues to shoot the inconvenient and to settle old scores even as the final deadline for the implementation of the agreement approaches.
You don't have to be unionist to recognise that the admission into government of an entity which is still killing people is a recipe for political and legal chaos. Seamus Mallon, a truly great and brave man, said of the death of Paul Downey that those responsible "have assumed the power over life and death. Society must be protected from those who resort to violence for any reason."
Protected? It is now the policy of the British and Irish governments to give power to such people. Indeed, Irish and British officials are now working on a formula to install political representatives of those "who resort to violence for any reason" into the Exceutive, with the safeguard that, if the IRA does not disarm, the mechanisms will be created to ensure the expulsion of Sinn Fein from the Exceutive.
This is excellent stuff. And how rigidly will this formula be implemented? With the doctrinaire pusillanimity with which the Mitchell Principles have been enforced - that is to say, not at all? The Mitchell report, compromising between the no-talks until decommissioning and the no-decommissioning until there are talks, opted for a route whereby "decommissioning would take place during the process of all party-negotiations."
This is what all the participants of the peace process signed on for. The all-party negotiations have taken place, yet not a blowpipe has been handed in. Instead we have the gesture of the bodies as surrogates for bullets - only one body, as it turns out. Meanwhile, men and women are still being killed by terrorists of either kidney, who are notionally on ceasefire but in reality are not.
It has been a beautifully worked strategy, and Sinn Fein deserves credit on this day, the 60th anniversary of the outlawing of its military wing. Its leaders are brighter, more resourceful, more flexible and possess more vision than the purely constitutional politicians they are working with. Are they bright enough to recognise the truth in the adage: too clever for his own good?
Orange elephant
The Orange elephant is easily bemused by the light-footed and darting thrusts of the republican community. It has been outwitted and out-thought by the Sinn Fein leadership. But it has a trump card. It can lie down and refuse to budge; and no amount of republican snapping at its flanks will compel it to do what it does not want to. And it can also do what it has so often done before: simply roll over and crush a few creatures it believes to be its tormentors.
The month is June; incomprehensible fevers are warming within the old elephant hide, and maybe it is too late to calm those fevers. But unionist culture is a Sinn Fein culture: ourselves alone. The worst, last thing that we should be doing is to feed its garrison-paranoia. And that is precisely what has been happening. Time to tremble.