Against a background of continuing stalemate in the peace process, Mr Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein insist they are unable to persuade the IRA to make a start on decommissioning its weapons. If it is to be accepted that this is so, and not merely a negotiating position, then it must be close to time for fundamental rethinking by the two governments and the other parties which have bought into the Belfast Agreement.
The realities of the relationship between these two elements of the "republican family" and their role in the process have to be revisited. Mr Adams will say Sinn Fein made it clear from the beginning it does not represent the IRA, and a variety of euphemisms has been employed to reflect that position. It is true that Sinn Fein is not the IRA. It is but part - and, it is understood, a subordinate part - of a movement which continues to recognise the IRA as its supreme authority. It regards the IRA as the legitimate government of all of Ireland with power of life and death over its citizens and with the authority to wage war or to make peace.
None of those who have negotiated with the more politically-sophisticated, softly-spoken Sinn Fein over the past eight or nine years has been blind to these realities - not Mr John Hume, not either of the two governments in Dublin and London, not President Clinton. But with varying admixtures of scepticism and pragmatism they have responded to the proposition from the leadership of Sinn Fein that the Republican movement as a whole has for some time wished to substitute democracy for violence and to seek an agreed accommodation rather than a settlement by force of arms.
The most imaginative and strenuous efforts have been made to bring the republicans through what has been viewed as a transitional period. Although no start dates are stipulated, progress has been made on every major aspect of the Belfast Agreement which is to their benefit. There remains but one aspect of the agreement upon which there has been no start - the decommissioning of the IRA's arsenal. But it is not merely a question of the IRA being tardy or quibbling about quantities and dates. Its public position, repeated time and again, is that there will be no decommissioning, ever; not a round, not an ounce.
Mr Adams and his senior colleagues have brought the republican movement a long way with courage and determination; they can probably be taken at face value when they say they cannot deliver on IRA decommissioning and that to seek to do so would split the republican movement. But what democratically-committed representatives appear thus to be faced with is a demand for admission to government by an organisation which wants to have it both ways. Sinn Fein wants to be in politics. The wider republican movement, of which it is part, wants this too. But it also, apparently, wants to retain its capacity for violence through the IRA.
Senator Maurice Hayes well defined the issue recently. It is not clear what republican language means, he wrote. Are they refusing to decommission as a precondition to participation in the new structures agreed last year or does it mean "a refusal to contemplate any decommissioning at any time? If the first, it should not be beyond the limits of the possible to find a formula and a choreography which would remove the stigma of compulsion . . . .if the latter, if no movement on arms is to be acceptable to the IRA then the other parties to the agreement can only wonder what it was all about", he concluded.
Whatever it was about, it was not about destroying democracy by diluting it with continuing para-militarism. If that is what the IRA and Sinn Fein is asking wholly-committed democrats to agree to - if their analysis ever led them to believe such an arrangement would be possible - they must now understand that they have travelled under an illusion. If this is not what they have envisaged, then they need to know that like Senator Hayes, everyone else finds their language and their position baffling.