George Mitchell's book Making Peace was written with the candour of a man who thinks he is reviewing events that have been safely consigned to the past. In it he recalls meeting the then chief constable of the RUC, Hugh Annesley, in early 1996, when Mitchell was head of the International Body on Decommissioning. He was looking for ways around the impasse created when the British government refused to allow Sinn Fein into talks until the IRA began to decommission its weapons. Mitchell asked Annesley whether, if Gerry Adams wanted to, he could persuade the IRA to hand up arms prior to negotiations.
"Annesley," Mitchell recalled, "replied flatly, `No, he couldn't do it even if he wanted to. He doesn't have that much control over them'. All his top officials agreed. In a later meeting, Irish police and security officials expressed the same opinion in even stronger terms."
These well-informed opinions help to answer a nagging question. At the back of many minds there is a suspicion, grounded in harsh experience of the Armalite and ballot box strategy, that the Sinn Fein leadership is playing a dark and devious game. It is, quite bluntly, that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are not even trying to get the IRA to decommission, that they want to be in government but yet retain the extra edge of power and glamour that come from having a private army at your command.
George Mitchell's recollections of the RUC and Garda views suggest otherwise. They support what is in some respects a more benign belief that what is at issue in the current crisis is not what Gerry Adams will not do but what he cannot do. In that there is some small comfort.
Yet Mitchell's account also throws a deplorable reality into stark relief. It reminds us that the IRA does not consider itself accountable to its own political wing, let alone to the Irish people as a whole. For all the talk of democratic mandates, for all Sinn Fein's insistence that it owes its power to the people who vote for it, here is the reality of a group of unelected, largely invisible men who believe they have the sole right to exercise a private veto over the entire political process on this island.
There has always been a fundamentally anti-democratic strain in militant Irish republicanism, a belief that an armed vanguard represents the nation more truly than the nation itself. The idea was clearly expressed in 1916, when Thomas MacDonagh told his court martial: "We do not profess to represent the mass of the people of Ireland. We stand for the intellect and the soul of Ireland. To Ireland's soul and intellect the inert mass, drugged and degenerate by ages of servitude, must, in the distant day of resurrection, render homage and free service."
In this mentality it doesn't greatly matter that the degenerate, inert mass of the Irish electorate voted overwhelmingly for an agreement that demands decommissioning by May 2000. It doesn't matter what we drugged and deluded slaves want. These things will be decided in its own good time by the soul and, God help us, the intellect of Ireland as embodied in the Army Council of Oglaigh na hEireann. Our part is simply to render homage and free service.
Until recently the IRA was not alone in this monstrous presumption. Certain churchmen, as anyone who has read John Cooney's biography of John Charles McQuaid will recall, regarded themselves as entitled to demand the homage of the inert masses and their elected representatives. Certain politicians, as anyone who has followed the disgrace of Charles Haughey will know, identified themselves as the Spirit of the Nation and believed the political system was their private property. Certain businessmen, as anyone who recognises the words "Ansbacher Cayman" will understand, believed the political system existed largely for their benefit and that the inert masses ought to pay for it.
But this society has stopped tolerating these people and their appalling arrogance. In the last decade Irish politics has been largely about the rolling back of unaccountable power. Slowly and painfully we have been moving towards a society in which political power is a public, not a private, process. The one significant body within the polity of what used to be Catholic nationalist Ireland, which openly insists on retaining a private veto on democracy, is the IRA.
THE IRA's refusal to fulfil its responsibilities is thus a crucial matter, not just for the North, not just for the peace process, but for Irish democracy. What is at issue is not, as Gerry Adams continues to insist, unionist perversity. It is the willingness of a tiny group of self-appointed people to defy all democratic imperatives, including the wishes of those who vote for their own political wing, Sinn Fein. Also at stake in this is the continued ability of elected Irish governments to honour their commitments.
At every stage in the peace process, Irish governments have made it clear to the unionists and to everyone else that they would not attempt to create institutions that allowed Sinn Fein into power without IRA decommissioning.
Back in December 1993, on the day of the Downing Street Declaration, Dick Spring, then minister for foreign affairs, stressed in the plainest terms that decommissioning would be the way to determine whether the IRA ceasefire was permanent: "We are talking about the handing up of arms and are insisting that it would not be a temporary cessation of violence to see what the political process offers."
In January 1999 Bertie Ahern told the Sunday Times that Sinn Fein could not take its seat in the Executive "without at least a commencement of decommissioning, and that would apply in the North and the South". Last April, in his joint Hillsborough Declaration with Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern envisaged that within a month of the nomination of members of the Executive, there would be a "collective act of reconciliation" which would "see some arms put beyond use on a voluntary basis".
No one churchman, businessman, gunman has the right to block the legitimate democratic process. No party calling itself democratic can remain in thrall to the whims and fantasies of a secret cabal. That is what is meant by a phrase the IRA likes to repeat but has yet to understand, the self-determination of the Irish people.