If people come to this column at all, it is not for an understanding of this thing called the peace process, which is as great a mystery to me as is the Hubble telescope, writes Kevin Myers
So forgive me if I share my incomprehension with you over a few words from Sinn Féin/IRA leader Martin McGuinness in an interview with my colleague Deaglán de Bréadún earlier this week.
Asked if the IRA had a future role as a reserve force defending nationalist areas, he replied: "Given what we have been through over the course of the past 30 years and the hugely high level of politicisation which exists within republican areas, I don't think anybody ever envisages a time when nationalist communities will not be in a position to defend themselves in a crisis."
His words. And they include the words "not" and "ever" in response to a question about the future of the IRA in "defending" nationalist areas. In other words, not merely have they not gone away, they're never ever going to go away. This was an open-ended commitment to the continued existence of the IRA, regardless of promises from Gerry Adams that the IRA was considering embracing democracy fully. Will there be a time when the IRA does not exist in nationalist areas? Answer: Not + Ever = Never.
Now we can dispose of the fiction that the IRA actually defends nationalists. Ask the McCartney family, for a start; then consider the Troubles, during which the IRA was responsible for the deaths of over 400 Catholics. Moreover, it is not the police or the British army which nightly smashes the limbs of nationalist youngsters; no indeed, not - it is their defenders. Spare us all such defenders.
So what is there left to discuss any more? Martin McGuinness, who is both Sinn Féin's chief negotiator and an IRA leader, replied to a question about the IRA - not the Salvation Army, not the PSNI, not An Garda Síochána - unequivocally: "I don't think anybody envisages a time when nationalist communities will not be able to defend themselves". But of course, that's simply not true. Lots of nice, decent dupes have been envisaging a time when nationalist communities will not be able to defend themselves, because it is the mark of a civil society that communities within it do not defend themselves. Defence, policing and law are state monopolies. That is why we have men and women in uniforms with laws authorising and defining their authority.
Only in the perverse world of the peace process could a party which insists on its right to enter government also insist that it forever retain its armed wing for "defensive" purposes. No doubt these include beating a man to death, cutting his throat and gouging out an eye, then covering up and intimidating all witness into silence. Maybe these include robbing banks whenever the mood strikes. Maybe these include breaking teenagers' legs. Who knows? Because I know this. I don't know. I haven't got a clue. Not a clue. You want an answer to any peace process question that keeps you awake at night? Well don't come here: seek elsewhere.
Three years ago, the IRA raided Castlereagh Special Branch headquarters and made off with computer disks which compromised the safety of the entire security infrastructure in Northern Ireland, and I privately - and perhaps even publicly; I can't remember - predicted that the peace process was over. No government would tolerate such behaviour, I airily declared, but of course I was wrong. In peace process land, governments tolerate just about anything - and if you doubt it, ask Eamon Collins's widow.
Thus governments actively refuse to impose the rule of law on Sinn Féin-IRA, and in the case of our own Government, unconstitutionally and therefore unlawfully tolerates the unconstitutional. Our Constitution unequivocally recognises one Army in this Republic, whose current Commander in Chief is President McAleese, and whose Chief of Staff is Jim Sheerin.
But the actual practice of the past 10 years has been to tolerate the existence of another army, not answerable to the President, but answerable to the grand wizards of the IRA army council, who draw their mandate from . . .well, the dead, actually. Wonderful, bloody wonderful, in a 21st-century European democracy as it stands on the brink of endorsing a Constitution for all of Europe.
So what will our embrace of two thousand pages of incomprehensible eurobabble - if it actually comes about - actually mean? (When it has finally been translated into passable English, I'll give you an opinion on it). After all, we ignore our own Constitution when it suits us, and permit a rival army to recruit and train in competition with our authorised Army.
And our politicians have stayed silent when a leader of that illegal army blithely declares that there will never be a time when it is not in existence, though the ending of all armed activity is supposedly one of the goals of this wretched peace process.
Tolerance of the continued existence of a terrorist army has gone hand in hand with a historical torpor which has allowed IRA-Sinn Féin to create a foreshortened narrative landscape, in which August 1969, internment, Bloody Sunday and British collusion with loyalist terrorists bulk large in the foreground, concealing the far vaster but more distant Himalayas of republican atrocities, which become increasingly invisible as time and the historical pollution of the peace process have their ruinous way.
Just wait for the whispered mantra, to the tune of "Campdown Races": Who shot Jean McConville dead? Brits did, Brits did. . .