Scepticism greeted the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, when on his visit to Washington last week he dared to be an optimist. His suggestion that an IRA ceasefire would be called soon provoked negative reaction in Belfast and was all but ridiculed by some participants in the present process. Questioned about his optimism, the Taoiseach said it was based on his information that the UUP and SDLP were making progress on the decommissioning issue. It must therefore he hoped that yesterday's reports, supported this morning by new information from this newspaper's Security Correspondent, that there is to be a meeting of the IRA Convention, in order to call a permanent ceasefire, may prove to be well founded.
It cannot happen too soon. Seldom has the atmosphere in the North been as poisonous and there can be no more forceful example of the anger and confusion unleashed by Drumcree than the demonstrations outside Catholic churches in Ballymena, Bushmills and Dervock, Co Antrim over the weekend. These demonstrations are a measure of how far the situation in the North has been allowed to drift with boycotts organised in a number of towns and villages, directed in the main against Orangemen who took part in the coat trailing activities of the order in nationalist areas.
Where it is specific in its choice of targets rather: than a cover for sectarianism, the tactic will be viewed by some as having a certain quality linking the perceived aggression of an individual too the outrage it has provoked. And those who join in can reasonably say that there is no law that obliges them to be the customers of any particular shop. Yet the boycott is undeniably a blunt weapon. It comes from a sense of deep injustice and inequality before the forces of the law. Historically, those who devised it had no other means of channelling their political opposition or making their presence felt.
Once launched, however, boycotting can take on a life of its own, insidiously working its way into the social fabric and setting up patterns of behaviour which will militate against political progress. While, as the recent Irish Times opinion poll indicated, many people believe that the tactic will help to fend off a descent into armed violence by providing a viable alternative, its effect could be precisely the opposite one of reinforcing an inward looking solidarity in both communities and creating a climate of support for a large scale return to violence.
These are not inevitable consequences, but the reality of a tit for tat reaction affecting businesses across the board, and disrupting ordinary life as it did on Saturday night, is a much more pressing risk. That is one significant difference from the days when a Captain Boycott could be isolated and picked off, making an example of him and undermining the system he was part of. The current campaigns cannot have a comparable effect. The reality is boycotts help to envenom an already uncertain political situation, to strengthen the sense of self justification among violent extremists marching under the banner of Orangeism, and, whether deliberately or not, to further entrench sectarianism.
In this newspaper on Saturday the Political Correspondent, Geraldine Kennedy, wrote describing the thinking behind the Taoiseach's Washington message "There are facts which you know to be facts. And there are facts which can create other facts. That was the basis on which Mr Bruton was injecting optimism into the Northern pessimism after Drumcree. Now, with the possibility and it is no more than that of another ceasefire emerging it becomes even more important for dialogue to replace demonstration.