It is true, as Bertie Ahern told his Australian audience, that de Valera declared in July 1923 that "the war, so far as we are concerned, is over". Dev added, but Bertie did not: "Politically, we shall continue to deny the right, and to combat the exercise of, any foreign authority in Ireland. In particular we shall refuse to admit that our country may be carved up and partitioned by such an authority".
The war is over? In what way? As Tim Pat Coogan points out in his biography of de Valera, four years later, daytime Fianna Fail TDs were by night IRA volunteers again. And what stood between government and the warriors of destiny, wasn't the non-negotiable opinion of Northern unionists, but the very negotiable oath of allegiance. As Dev resolved that obstacle with a wave of a wand, and the magic words, "empty formula", so had he supposedly disposed of the IRA with an equally empty abracadabra that the war was over.
Escape clause
It wasn't then. It isn't now. But he covered himself with his typical escape-clause, "so far as we are are concerned". Within a decade and a half his firing squads were proof-positive that the war wasn't over. Citing his words of 77 years ago as evidence of the sunlit pastures that lie ahead - provided verbal formulas are uttered - might well have convinced Bertie Ahern's Australian audience. It is unlikely to have convinced either the leading councils of the IRA or the Ulster Unionists.
There is not an army in the world which has ever said it will never fight a war, which is what the Taoiseach hopes for from the IRA; there is not an army in the world which, undefeated, surrenders its weapons, which is what the unionists want from the IRA; there is not a democratic party in the world which will go into government with a still-armed terrorist group, which is what Sinn Fein-IRA want of the unionists: there is not a political party in the world which will be returned to government if it ignores the wishes of its supporters, which is what Sinn Fein-IRA wants of the unionists.
In order to inveigle the uninveiglable into what they will never be inveigled into doing, i.e. Sinn Fein-IRA behaving like democrats, both Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen are making parity-of-esteem noises between the IRA and the British army.
Worse came from Peter Mandelson, whose sneers at the expense of the Household Division were no doubt calculated to propitiate some appeasable nationalist constituency he has been advised exists in Ireland.
No such constituency exists; most Irish people do not sneer at British ceremonial, but they rather respect and admire it. Whatever constituency delights in the Mandelson observations will merely find its own anglo-phobic prejudices confirmed. It will not be mollified or pacified; nor will it be moved to regret the deaths of the "chinless wonders" it has caused.
Who are they?
Who are the chinless wonders the Secretary of State has in mind, I ask myself? Guardsman Sammy Murphy of the Irish Guards, home on leave in Andersonstown when he was murdered by the IRA in 1977, perhaps? Or Captain Robert Nairac, who though tortured hideously, stayed true to the oath he had made as a soldier to his queen and country, and in silence went to his appalling end? Or the four horsemen of the Blues and Royals, led by Lieutenant Anthony Daly, blown to chinless perdition by an IRA bomb in Hyde Park? Or Guardsman Michael Doyle, murdered by the IRA in West Belfast?
I cite these names because, apart from Nairac, these chinless wonders were either Irish or of Irish extraction. (And whatever else you can say about Nairac, he was breathtakingly courageous). No doubt the Secretary of State thought he was ingratiating himself by reaching for crowd-pleasing racial stereotypes of the English, rather as the worst kind of Irish comedian once pandered to an appetite for similar stereotyping with thick-mick stories in Britain. A piece of advice here, Peter: Irish people don't respect foreigners who run down their own country or its institutions when abroad; though I would by God dearly love to be a fly on the wall when next you meet the GOC Northern Ireland.
Doomed attempt
But all these contortions - speeches from 1923, Irish suggestions that the British close down a few bases, British sneers at the British armed forces - are occurring in a desperate, doomed attempt to turn a committed carnivore into a vegetarian. In vain. The IRA will very possibly not go back to chewing raw meat; but then neither will it start chewing lentils and humming vegan mantras. In 1939 - 16 years after Dev's supposedly auspicious words - the IRA emptied the Phoenix Park Magazine Fort of a million rounds of Thompson sub machine-gun ammunition, prompting mass-internment, hunger-strikes and murder.
Thirty years later, Thompson sub-machine guns, using ancient ammunition, were in action against the RUC in Belfast at the start of these troubles.
If today there is peace, of a sort, then the peace process has worked, sort of. But if it can go no further, so be it. The unionist community and the republican community have each been stretched close to the limits of their elasticity. When elastic snaps, it returns to its old position, but with dreadfully destructive violence. Like a gambler being called to play double-or-quits, we should know when to get out of the game. To ask more is to risk all.
Call it quits.