The republican movement faces perhaps the most critical week of its long existence with no guarantees that it will emerge unscathed and united at the end of the crucial Sinn Fein Ardfheis next Sunday.
It will be proposed that the movement essentially jettisons its militarist approach in favour of politics only, truly revolutionary for an organisation which can justifiably claim to have brought about the most significant political changes in Ireland this century.
Without the IRA who fought the War of Independence, there would not be a Republic of Ireland today. Without the IRA, the dynamic for change which now exists in Northern Ireland could not have come about. Without an IRA ceasefire, the peace process which has given hope to so many would be impossible.
How big a change is being contemplated within the movement? Consider that the militarist tradition has always won out in republicanism, but it has cost the movement dear. It fought the War of Independence but lost the peace when the militarists could not accept the compromise which created the Irish Free State. In 1927, the man it had followed into the wilderness after the Civil War, Eamon de Valera, turned his back on its uncompromising vision and later jailed and executed many of his former comrades.
A generation later it was Sean MacBride, a former IRA Chief of Staff who turned away from it and went into government with Clann na Poblachta. After him came Sean Lemass, who built his political career out of his IRA activity but who spurned his former colleagues once he was elected.
Many times this century, the IRA has provided the launching-pad for stellar political careers but has faced only a bitter harvest, including executions and jailings, once the person achieved high political office.
That could all be about to change. What is being proposed, for the first time, is that the militarists cede to the politicians the future of the republican movement. It is a revolutionary notion, one perhaps not fully appreciated, with a huge risk of failure.
In the past politicians broke with the republicans rather than try to convert them to achieving their aims by political means. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have proposed something far more revolutionary - that the militarists stay on board, united with their political representatives, to achieve their goals.
They have cogent arguments to put forward. The failures of the past when the IRA did the fighting and others picked up the political kudos, went on to assume power and then turned on their former comrades, are all too evident in history's pages.
Until after the hunger strikes, it seemed a re-run of history for the IRA was occurring in the Northern conflict. Its political wing, Sinn Fein, had no standing, showing up at around 2 per cent in opinion polls. While it was doing the fighting, killing and dying, it had no access to the levers of power in Northern Ireland or the Republic.
Something fundamental changed after the hunger strikes, the effect of which we will all witness next weekend as Sinn Fein debates its new departure at the special ardfheis.
It is now, unbelievably, the third-largest party in Northern Ireland. In the Republic, its numbers in many polls are as high as the Progressive Democrats and consistently higher than Democratic Left, two parties which have taken important roles in the two most recent governments.
It remains the only party which has the possibility of taking part in the governments of both parts of the island in the not-too-distant future - becoming the only undeniable All-Ireland body with executive powers in the process. The pace of change within the movement has been dizzying, yet there is a broad impatience and lack of understanding on the outside about just how hard that has been to achieve.
Thus, the recent IRA statement with its flat denial of any intent to decommission and its quibbling about whether the May 22nd referendums constituted exercises in self-determination drew shock and out rage in many quarters. There should be little surprise that the organisation must continue to - Janus-faced - reassure those within its movement who fear a sell-out or surrender which unilateral decommissioning would certainly represent, while allowing its political representatives to get on with the job.
What was missed was the admonition to IRA supporters to follow their political leaders - an unheard-of concept for the republican movement a few short years ago. It was an extraordinary gesture of faith by the IRA in this Sinn Fein political leadership.
Thus, republicans stand on the cusp of the new century with a different vision than the one with which their predecessors began this one. The fight is far from over, the finish line not yet in sight, but they have two stark and competing visions to contemplate next weekend.
On the one side is the primacy of their "armed struggle" - one they know they cannot possibly win outright. On the other is the sometimes painfully slow and tortuous political process which, however, has yielded then spectacular electoral and international gains already.
That they have reached this crossroads is a tribute to the skill of their political leadership - and, indeed, to the willingness of the IRA to consider an alternative strategy to physical force.
They are both flying in the face of history, the reality that the militarists always win out in this movement, but the limitations of a policy where they have done all the fighting but never got the political power which flowed to others from their battles must be evident to them. Now they have embarked on a new and risky direction.
These are indeed extraordinary times. A British prime minister has apologised for the Famine and has taken a direct interest in solving the Irish question; a unionist leader has shown courage under fire from his own hardliners; an Irish leader has shown the skill and political imagination to bring nationalist Ireland with him; a US president has committed the vast resources of his office to helping political progress in Ireland.
An SDLP leader has crossed over to bring Sinn Fein in from the cold and an armed revolutionary movement has begun to contemplate a political path as Tim Pat Coogan has written in his book The Troubles. "A window of opportunity, unequalled in the history of the Anglo-Irish relationship has been opened." This weekend I believe we will see it opened even wider as the republican movement takes another giant step.
Niall O'Dowd is publisher of the Irish Voice