Collateral damage. This terrible euphemism is being bandied about again in the context of possible NATO air strikes against Serbia. We know what the weasel words mean. Men, women and children killed; innocent civilians fleeing their villages, losing their homes.
In our own island, collateral damage means Rosemary Nelson's bonny children, each one clutching a single red rose, walking behind their mother's coffin. The phrase includes the beating of 13-year-old Ian Price by a gang of masked men in Newtownards. He was one of seven victims of so-called punishment beatings last weekend.
Ian Price's case received some attention because of his age and the severity of his injuries. The other cases remained largely anonymous, rating a few lines in the newspapers, sickeningly familiar stories of beatings with nail-studded cudgels, threats to get out or else.
There may be worse to come, if the problems over decommissioning and the setting up of an executive are not resolved quickly. The signals are bleak just now. There is little sign that attitudes are about to soften on either side. If anything, the mood has hardened, not just within the republican movement, but across the broad nationalist community since Rosemary Nelson's murder. At her funeral in Lurgan last Thursday, a man said to me: "You can kiss goodbye to any idea of decommissioning now".
We have to remember that we have been here before. A year ago at this time it was virtually impossible to believe that the political parties in Northern Ireland would be able to reach a consensus, yet the miraculously complex Belfast Agreement was signed.
The peace may be imperfect and the collateral damage still appalling, but great strides have been made towards setting new political structures in place.
Last week's reports from Washington indicated that both David Trimble and Gerry Adams were prepared to soften their rhetoric. But the argument over the hand-over of weapons, which has threatened the whole peace process from the start, seems as intractable as ever.
Bertie Ahern is to travel to Belfast next week for meetings with Tony Blair to try and choreograph the steps that will make it possible to meet the Friday deadline for the setting up of the executive. The circumstances of this joint exercise are less auspicious than they were a year ago.
There is now a sense that Tony Blair's firm control of an overall strategy in Northern Ireland has faltered. Nobody doubts the British Prime Minister's commitment to the search for peace, or forgets the energy which he devoted to it in the run-up to the Belfast Agreement last year. But Mr Blair has other matters on his mind, primarily his government's involvement in NATO's strikes against Yugoslavia and the very real threat of a ground war with British troops.
This is the most obvious and serious of his political worries, but there are others - Scottish devolution, how to advance Britain's intricate relationship with the European Union, and mutterings in his own ranks at the increasingly authoritarian style of his government.
THESE issues have diverted Mr Blair's attention from Northern Ireland. He has made mistakes, or allowed them to be made. Some people would argue that his grasp of the detail of the peace process has never been entirely sure.
They point to his famous letter to David Trimble giving assurances on decommissioning that were not part of the Belfast Agreement and which have contributed to the present impasse.
More recently, the continuous speculation about Mo Mowlam's future, leaked from Downing Street and designed to exploit the Secretary of State's popularity in Britain, have shown little concern for confidence in Northern Ireland.
Then, this week, came Jack Straw's attempt to block the release of four republican prisoners, sentenced originally in Britain but later transferred to Northern Ireland.
The timing of this intervention, at a particularly critical moment in the peace process, is almost impossible to understand. It came just as Gerry Kelly was visiting the Maze Prison, presumably to discuss the present situation with republican prisoners and whether there was any step the IRA might take to resolve it.
The issue of prisoners has been absolutely central to the implementation of the Belfast Agreement. Next to decommissioning, it has presented the greatest difficulties to many parties to the accord. We have seen the furious objections in this State to any proposal for the early release of the men who killed Garda Jerry McCabe. In Northern Ireland, too, the release of paramilitary prisoners has caused great pain to the victims, who have been told that they must accept it as part of the price of securing a lasting peace.
From the very start of the process, the release of prisoners has been crucial to securing the broad republican movement's support for the move away from violence and towards politics. It has offered tacit recognition that those who had been involved in the long years of violent conflict were politically motivated.
Tony Blair appeared to accept this. On several occasions, when his government came under pressure to slow down the programme of early releases, he defended it in the House of Commons as integral to the Belfast accord.
Mercifully, Jack Straw's attempt to change the rules was rejected by the court in Belfast, where Mr Justice Girvan upheld the original decision of the Northern Ireland Sentence Review Commission to release the four men. But considerable damage had already been done, not least by a Downing Street spokesman's defence of the Home Secretary's action.
In hardline republican circles, his intervention is seen as another example of Britain's less-than-wholehearted commitment to implementing the terms of the Belfast Agreement. In the broader community, it has left the sour suspicion that terrorist acts committed on the British mainland are seen as different, and deserving of harsher punishment, than such atrocities in Northern Ireland.
Mo Mowlam has described this week as "one of the most critical in Northern Ireland in recent years". Such acts of bungling incompetence by British ministers make the search for a compromise even more difficult. It is high time for Tony Blair to re-impose his personal and political authority on the peace process.