It is a little wearisome to hear commentators who for years have predicted that the IRA would never enter into genuine peace-talks now transfer their paranoid Jeremiahism to the various splinter groups which have emerged in the wake of the recent ceasefire and the Belfast Agreement.
Anyone who would equate a revolutionary people's movement like the Provisionals with a bunch of disgruntled trigger-happy pseudo-patriots deserves to be given a gold watch and told to hand in their floppy disks. These people are more wrong now than they have ever been, and that is saying something.
The Continuity IRA and the 32-County Sovereignty Committee may have a moral right to campaign against the British presence in Ireland, but they do not have a moral pretext to pursue the ending of that presence through violence. They will therefore not succeed in any long-term campaign based on violence.
When I say that they have "no moral pretext", I am neither suggesting that past violence was justified nor engaging in moralising about it. I am saying, quite precisely, that the moral context which previously existed for acts of violence in the name of Irish independence no longer exists.
This is not because of the Belfast Agreement, but because the store of moral energy which was available previously, and which was tapped for nearly three decades by the Provisionals, has now run dry. One delegate at Sunday's Sinn Fein Ardfheis in Dublin characterised the shift which occurred in republican strategy five years ago as a shift from defensive to offensive action. Most outside observers would have perceived things the other way around.
But to envisage correctly the tactic in which republicanism has been engaged, it is necessary to see current events in the context of the changing moral climate, as much as the political or military landscapes, of the conflict. In the context of the long-term relationship between Ireland and Britain, Irish republicanism is a revolutionary philosophy, and no revolution can survive for long without popular support.
The usual purpose of political action alongside paramilitary activity - i.e. the relationship of the ballot box to the Armalite - is to maintain as much popular support as possible for the armed struggle by articulating and prosecuting the grievances being fought for. But we have observed, over the past two decades or so, a gradual shrinking of the moral high ground on which republicans stood.
Of course, that ground never existed in the minds of some observers and/or participants, most obviously unionists and the British authorities.
Gradually, through the pursuit of a propaganda war in the Republic, these forces began to eat away at the moral oxygen of sentiment and sympathy on which republicanism depended for its survival. From a republican perspective, the problem came to be less to do with British occupation of Irish territory as the dominance of the British view of the situation through control of public thought.
This process was speeded up by the effects of Provisional atrocities, which challenged many of those who otherwise sympathised with republicanism either to support unspeakable acts or abandon such notions entirely. Many chose to abandon the ideas.
Outside of its own communities, Sinn Fein was successfully demonised. Within its communities, there was a sense of relevancy and of togetherness, but these were mostly communities which were suffering the very worst of military repression, coercion and discrimination.
Although the wider world was increasingly hostile, in the ghettos of west Belfast or Crossmaglen or Derry the moral pretext for the IRA campaigns remained relatively intact. This different perception, combined with a growing sense of alienation and abandonment, created a hothouse atmosphere in which the armed struggle was increasingly justified the more its wider base was shrunk.
Essential to this process was an iconography drawn less from the ancient history of Irish republicanism than from the recent history of the Troubles: Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes of the early 1980s, and occasional outrages against republican activists such as the Gibraltar shootings of 1988.
For years, British governments, although mouthing moral platitudes to beat a marching band, had utterly failed to perceive the true moral climate in which the violence occurred. Because they could attribute no fault to themselves - insisting on identifying IRA violence as terror for terror's sake - they contributed immeasurably to the creation of the very iconography which fuelled the violence.
Mrs Thatcher's attitude to the hunger strikes, and the use of shoot-to-kill policies in the North, Gibraltar etc., provided graphic illustrations of the counter-productive nature of this form of thinking.
AS the first far-seeing prime minister for more than 50 years, Tony Blair understood that, to pull the ground from under republican violence, he had to deconstruct the iconography. Hence, in addition to making concessions to nationalism which might be described as quid pro quos, Mr Blair has also engaged in manoeuvres which, while appearing to be concessions, are actually moves to remove the moral underpinning of physical force republicanism.
Key examples include the renewed investigation into Bloody Sunday and the Dublin bombings, and the Patten Commission which is to examine the role of the RUC.
These concessions to truth and justice, however belated, will have a remarkable series of effects on Irish society. In the first place, of course, they will pull the already flimsy moral rug from under all but the most myopic of republican physical force proponents. This is why the media fuss about republican splinter groups is misplaced.
The only way in which such groups could achieve the kind of popular support they require to survive in any significant way would be if a loyalist onslaught on the nationalist community was ignored by both the security forces and the IRA. It is somewhat unlikely that both of these bodies will remain unresponsive at the same time.
The dismantling of the moral pretext for republican violence will also release in Irish society a hugely complex wave of reaction in which the circumstances of our collective journey away from nationalism/republicanism will have to be revisited.
It will be necessary for us to look again at all of the participants in the conflict, but especially those on what might loosely be termed our own side, and to reconsider the extent to which, for largely spurious reasons, we have been willing to jettison values without which no society or people can very long survive.