What is it about the Sinn Féin-IRA leadership that the most ardent anti-terrorists who fall within the magnetic field of its charm totter away with stars in their eyes, probably warbling Kevin Barry and The Boys of Kilmichael? Take Richard Haass. He is a Jewish Republican, a Cold War warrior who probably still dreams of winning the Vietnam War. He gnaws barbed wire whenever he feels a little peckish.
He arrived in Northern Ireland to sort it out once and for all. His eyes were like needle-points, his language terse and chill, his face was carved from stone. He was the implacable marshal, come to sort out the bad boys.
He stood at the top of main street, his hands loose around his brace of Colts. Mothers hurried their children into cover; barmen put up their shutters; the blacksmith slunk inside the stables. Tumbleweed rolled in the dust. A voice began to warble - "Do not forsake me oh my darling ...."
And next we knew, Richard Haass was doing Riverdance down the main street alongside Tom Hartley and Alex Maskey, dressed in leprechaun hose and buckle-shoes, and bawling on top of his voice: "Come out you Black and Tans, Come and fight me like a man..." Soon he metamorphosed into Barry Fitzgerald, and last seen was sitting on a stile with a clay pipe and a cawbeen hat, talking to a cow.
For years, the SDLP was the vessel in which the governments of the Republic, the UK and the US placed their hopes for the nationalist North.
Gerry Fitt, John Hume, Seamus Mallon, Mark Durcan were all greatly respected, and the Department of Foreign Affairs at times sounded like John Hume's adoring younger brother.
But when the Shinners entered the picture, it was as if John Hume's forgotten big brother had come back from Texas in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, with a blonde on each elbow and gold ingots in his teeth; and suddenly Foreign Affairs had found a new favourite brother.
Not just Foreign Affairs: in Downing Street, even as plasterers were filling in the holes from the last mortar attack, the arrival of the Sinn Féin/IRA delegation prompted John Major to howl with joy and present himself to them in a rather similar fashion to which Edwina Currie had once presented herself to him. It never happened to John Hume.
Over in the White House, George Bush was lining up attacks on terrorist bases in Afghanistan, Beirut, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and even Iceland and the Vatican, when the Sinn Féin-IRA delegation arrived. The president promptly threw aside his Stetson, donned a balaclava, and grabbing a spade, asked if he could join the party.
The ever-cynical press corps, which chortles at the pretensions of the unionists, and mocks the provincialisms of the SDLP, suddenly becomes alert and happy when the Shinners are in the press conference lights. Shinners have glamour! Shinners are sexy! Shinners scare people! Observe any news conference given by political leaders - Blair, Ahern, Trimble, Durcan: the journalists are disrespectful, sceptical, mocking.
Watch a Sinn Fein press conference, and you'll hear deferential, obliging questions. Shinner evasions are never pursued: media-insubordination is rewarded with a long quiet schoolmasterly McAdams glare.
The Shinner charm is carried into negotiations, where it seems to neutralise the most basic instincts of the opposition. How else could David Trimble have given his assent to the Belfast Agreement of five and a half years ago without a fixed timetable for disarmament being the keystone of the entire arch? Not merely did the Agreement not demand visible disarmament before the Shinners got into Government, it contained no penalty clauses if the Shinners had not disarmed by the agreed date for total disarmament, three years ago.
Why does nobody remember this? Why do journalists at Shinner press conferences not remind the Shinners of this? Why, when the Shinners go on and on and on and on about bloody Patten, do the hacks not retort: Christ, how can there be full implementation of policing reforms when the IRA is still in existence, still armed, still recruiting, still training?
Why? Because of Shinner charm. It disarms: it makes the cleverest men fools. It turns even Jonathan Powell into a bumbling village idiot. It allows politicians to agree deals that are as water-tight as a colander.
Hence the Belfast Agreement of 1998: hence the utter farce of the other day.
How else could you explain the presence of Tony Blair in Hillsborough? He has a troubled heart. He is fighting a war in Iraq, with lesser conflicts in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. The British National Health Service is in disarray, public spending is running out of control, the housing shortage is far worse than ours, London is grinding to a halt; yet he spent a day in Northern Ireland waiting for the formal end of the Troubles.
How could he be so cretinous? Simple. Because that's what happens when you're dealing with the Shinners.
From Monday onwards, the British media in particular, but also much of the Irish media also - RTÉ especially - were announcing pretty much the same thing: that this week, Irish history was going to come to an end. "IRA set to disband as deal paves way for poll" was how the The Times, with spellbinding imbecility, put it, as if political agreements can be made binding on electorates, and the IRA is a local co-op.
How could so many people be made so utterly cretinous by so very few? Shinner charm.
Nothing like it.