It is not so much that we want peace without owning up to the war as that we want it without acknowledging our part in the war. When I say "we" I mean everyone apart from those whose hands touched the blood shed for our denial.
We who have no blood on our hands imagine we have nothing to explain. We look at the faces of those who pulled triggers and congratulate ourselves that we are not like them.
Yet perhaps the greatest dissimilarity between us relates not to principle but to courage. Perhaps the sense in which we are unlike them is not as much to our credit as we like to think.
To put it another way: there will be no peace until we lay the myth of the "men of violence" to rest. There are no "men of violence"; there are only men and violence and women and violence. These men and women are creations of our society. They breathe the same air as we do.
We judge them by their deeds so as to avoid judging ourselves by our cowardice. We fool ourselves that, by virtue of being "clean", we are innocent of the hatreds they have enacted. Yet we have simply held ourselves back from the logic of our condition.
I have always found it fascinating that, for such a small political party, the organisation which began life as the Official IRA and ended up as the Workers' Party should have had such a profound influence on Irish public thought. Having travelled long with guns in their hands, the "Stickies" became the most fanatical opponents of those who refused to leave their weapons down.
And, like reformed zealots in any culture of guilt, they found a receptive audience longing to cleanse itself. Not many people wanted to vote for the Stickies, perhaps because this would have meant owning up. And yet, by virtue of the product it was offering, the ideology of the Workers' Party became the ideology of the post-1980s Irish State.
The insistence of the Stickies that we reach out to the "other" was a necessary part of the journey of transformation, an essential component of the pressure cooker which served up the Belfast Agreement. Yet now that we have reached out to the other, we are stuck, unable to get beyond our guilt-centred inability to do anything but point fingers at those who refuse to leave the battlefield.
Because of this, we might profitably reflect on the recent work of the artist Brian Maguire, whose retrospective exhibition, Inside/Out, can be seen at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin until March 26th. Maguire, a close friend and long-time adviser of the former WP and Democratic Left leader, Proinsias De Rossa, made the Sticky journey.
With his Sticky fellow-travellers, Maguire encouraged this society's first tentative steps on the journey we fondly imagine has now been completed.
In a series of works to mark the Belfast Agreement, Maguire mounted his portraits of loyalist prisoners in Long Kesh in public spaces around Belfast. His first such work was Ex-combatants, in which portraits of members of the UVF were mounted on billboards on the Shankill Road.
A second installation, Looking Ahead, featuring eight portraits of UDA prisoners, was mounted on the Newtownards Road. Earlier, his portraits of IRA and INLA prisoners had received private showings in Belfast, there being a republican tradition that only dead activists have their faces shown in public.
The catalogue for Maguire's exhibition states: "For a citizen of the Republic to portray those involved in the republican struggle seems plausible but then to extend that activity into the ranks of the various loyalist forces at local level is somewhat less possible."
In a sense, this observation gets everything back to front, because anyone who understood Maguire's political journey would be more mystified that he could bring himself to paint republicans. A Sticky painting loyalists makes perfect political sense as part of the reparation process.
Maguire's engagement with the subject began 14 years ago with his visits to Portlaoise prison, where he started painting portraits of republicans. This for him was precisely an engagement with the other. Later on in the Maze, his purpose was the same: as a Southern Taig he wanted to understand loyalism. And, looking into the eyes of loyalists, he developed the desire to engage further with the other side, and began again to paint republicans.
I paint Maguire crudely as a "Sticky" - in fact, he is a decommissioned Sticky. I know that he does not lift a brush to paint anyone's politics, least of all his own. He paints people. His portraits are as remarkable as the idea of them, extending to their subjects a respect for their own self-images which attracted the inevitable charges that Maguire was "glorifying the men of violence".
Even without knowing that the portraits had been done in consultation with the subjects, you would know that the representations are close to how these men see themselves.
There is no judgment in them except that they invite the viewer to judge his or her own prejudices.
Their morality resides in the determination to present their subjects as they appear to their families and friends, free of the horns which society seeks to press on to their heads.
As to the charge of "glorification", in a strange way the portraits remind me of the Derry band of the late 1970s, the Undertones, who made a fetish of not looking like pop stars. Their early photographs were startling because they looked like people who were not famous at all.
Maguire's portraits do not glamorise and yet, by virtue of placing these faces in the streets whence they emerged, they say something about the pejorative iconisation of the ordinary individual by dint of extreme circumstances. Ordinary men do not qualify to have their faces blown up and pasted on sidewalls. Maguire has painted the still lives of the "men of violence".
His work here tells me two important new things.
One, the journey of reconciliation between the "two traditions" will not be ended by an embrace between the Southern nationalist (moderate or otherwise) and David Trimble, but in his embrace with Michael Stone.
Two, the journey will not be over until that Southern nationalist has crossed the road to kneel at the grave of Bobby Sands.
jwaters@irish-times.ie