Kevin Myers: Does anyone recognise this country that we're living in? This is a land where a widow can be abducted from her screaming family, tortured, murdered and secretly buried.
The 10 orphans - the eldest just 15 - were left to mind themselves for weeks before welfare workers were alerted. The family was then broken up for all time, and raised in the grey walls of orphanages.
Decades go by, as the organisation which murdered Jean McConville continue their unauthorised, fascist war. Thousands die, tens of thousands are bereaved, and countless billions are squandered. Our two islands navigate a sea of suffering before various governments pilot the authors of all this evil and misery into a safe haven which has been especially made for them.
Then the remains of Jean McConville are finally found. How? We don't know. But found they are, serving to remind us of the single greatest crime in a quarter-century-long festival of criminality and wickedness. For this was a uniquely abominable crime, abominable in its intent, abominable in its planning, abominable in its outcome, in all its squalid detail: all as planned, all as intended.
If ever a crime called to the heavens for vengeance, it was this. If ever a crime called for dissociation from the perpetrators' colleagues, it was this. If ever crime deserved to be marked out by democrats and democracies as one which excluded those responsible from lifelong redemption,
it was this.
Well, Sinn Féin and the IRA are now wandering the harbour town to which the peace process has steered them. If they are blinking in surprise in this strange country, who can blame them? They are being fêted; bunting hangs from the lamp-standards, crowds dance, and brass bands play at every street corner. A postman staggers up, his bag trailing along the ground: Lord bless my soul, what can this be? Invitations. Invitations to the White House, invitations to Downing Street, invitations to the Taoiseach's office, invitations to open fêtes, invitations to write autobiographies, invitations to attend film premières, invitations to first nights. Invitations galore.
But surely the invitations would dry up when the widow's remains were brought back to her native Belfast? Surely the brass bands would cease to play for the organisation which did her to death? Surely the bunting could come down and the crowds would cease their gallivanting and instead would fill the church to overflowing for her funeral? Surely those unable to get into the church would line the Falls Road in silent tribute to a widow woman who once gave succour to a dying soldier?
Not so. Not in the diseased harbour of Port Peace Process, where the ordinary rules of human conduct have been replaced by rules unknown to any civilisation anywhere. So even in the ceremonies of obsequy, her perpetrators triumphed, as they had triumphed in her life, and as they had triumphed in her death.
Where was West Belfast last Saturday morning? Maybe 300 mourners who weren't connected with the McConville family were present at the church, in which there were many empty places. The Falls Road was not lined with people empathising with a widow dragged to her death from her home, or the 10 orphans thus created. Neither British nor Irish government was represented. It seemed that, confronted by the political consequences of recognising the murder so uniquely and vilely sui generis, civilisation faltered and then failed; and with it perished the flower of all decency.
It was left to the unelected Mgr Thomas Toner to publicly utter words which should more rightly have emanated from the Department of the Taoiseach or Downing Street. "In the history of our Troubles, there can be no more despicable act than the abduction, murder and casual disposal of the body of Jean McConville and the subsequent plight of her children. It is our most shameful example of the moral corruption and degradation that violence generates in the human spirit."
This is why we have churches; for when political expediency disposes of decency; when almost an entire community can boycott the systematically abused and murdered victim and embrace the killer as hero; when political leaders stay silent because their contract is with the perpetrators, not with the sorry detritus of a human body they have bequeathed her family; then in the contaminated wilderness that remains, we need to hear God's righteous anger through the voice of such as Mgr Toner.
What next in the strange place we all live in, Port Peace Process? Look at the elected politicians who did attend Jean McConville's funeral: Mark Durcan, Alex Attwood, Martin Morgan, Alban Maginness, David Trimble. Which of them will survive the electoral Golgotha in under three weeks' time? For we already all know that the richest rewards of the Peace Process have fallen and will continue to fall to those who have engaged most in the processes of war. Their prisoners are free, their spirits high, their regrets non-existent.
The argument of the lazy moralist says that it's all been worth it because of the lives which have been saved. But there were other, more civilised ways of ending the Troubles without embracing the killers and turning our backs on the dead. Instead we have entered a pact with the people who brought about Jean McConville's death.
She went to her grave unmourned by either State, and virtually ignored by the community she once lived among. Thus she had her second, slightly less secret burial. Can we get any lower? To judge by past performance, unquestionably. This is the country we're living in.