This is a defining moment for the credibility of the Sinn Féin leadership within the democratic system and the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell, has characterised it with customary lack of restraint.
The £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery was either carried out by republican activists of the Provisional IRA or it was not. If it was, as the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Mr Hugh Orde, opined yesterday week, the authority of Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness to lead the peace process and the political negotiations with the Irish and British governments has been seriously damaged. If it was not, then the Sinn Féin leadership should be in a position to say so, unambiguously, insist on P. O'Neill making the necessary statement and call on the perpetrators to be reported to the PSNI.
More than a week after the Chief Constable's judgment, neither has happened. And there can be no plea of humiliation in mitigation.
In a public interview - published in Question and Answer form in yesterday's editions to allow readers to make up their own minds - Mr Adams gave a carefully-crafted denial of any IRA responsibility for the robbery. "The IRA has said it did not do it. In my opinion the IRA is telling the truth. Hugh Orde said 'in my opinion' [ the IRA did the robbery]. He has his opinion. I have my opinion". He went on to suggest that he had as much right to be believed "in me stating honestly my opinion" as had Mr Orde.
It would seem reasonable to assume from that answer that the IRA at the highest level did not authorise the robbery - though P. O'Neill has not said so this time and Mr Adams doesn't know why. The Taoiseach has often said that Sinn Féin and the IRA are two sides of the one coin. The Sinn Féin leadership would know because their inestimable value to the peace/political process, after all, has been their ability to "influence" the IRA.
Mr Adams was ambiguous, however, when it was suggested that the robbery, like the murder of Det. Garda Jerry McCabe, could have been a lower-level action, sanctioned or unsanctioned . "If they didn't do it, they didn't do it", he said, where a simple "No" would have sufficed.
And journalists were told "Get real" when, as happened in the McCabe case, the Sinn Féin leadership campaigned for the early release of persons convicted of a crime first denied and later admitted. "I am not going to go up that road with you because it is a totally hypothetical situation", he said.
The weakness in Mr Adams's response to the robbery is not that he believes the IRA. It is the caveats which he has put in place which challenge the very fundamentals of democracy in this State. "In our opinion, the IRA was not involved ... and we are not going to change unless something shattering, or new evidence, or something else comes in to make us change our mind". Forensically speaking, Mr Adams, can you say whether IRA activists, authorised or unauthorised, carried out the robbery?