THE problem that has bedevilled the preparations for the all party talks has been inherent to the situation from the start. Up to the time Albert Reynolds entered into indirect contact with Sinn Fein, the clear stance of Irish constitutional nationalism had always been that there could be no negotiation with a minority terrorist group like the IRA until it had abandoned violence and given up its weapons and explosives.
For with its armoury it has already killed some 2,000 people in the North, in Britain, on the continent and in this State, where their victims number over a dozen members of our security forces, including, perhaps, Garda McCabe yesterday. There are others such as Senator Billy Fox, shot down in a sectarian, bible burning raid on a Protestant homestead in Co Monaghan.
In the period immediately before the cessation of violence, the constitutional nationalist position on IRA weapons was powerfully reiterated by both John Hume and, in the Dail, Dick Spring.
Nevertheless the handing over of weapons was not insisted upon by Albert Reynolds as part of the cessation of violence which he negotiated and which was intended to lead to the participation of Sinn Fein, on behalf of the IRA, in negotiations with the British government and other Northern Ireland parties.
It is easy to see how this came about. Better a ceasefire with this arms issue left open than no ceasefire at all, Albert Reynolds must have thought. Decommissioning, as it later came to be known, could be left to be dealt with later. And who is to say he was wrong, that he should have risked continuing violence by making decommissioning a precondition at that point?
Undoubtedly, however, this situation posed a difficult problem for the British government. In common with every Irish government since the 1930s, that government worked on the basis that, in contrast to situations where a nationalist movement with majority support was concerned, democracy must not be undermined by political negotiations with minority terrorist groups while these groups retained weapons with which to threaten violence if in the talks they failed to impose their will on the majority.
In this situation the task facing the British government was, first, to decide in conjunction with the Irish government how far it could reasonably go while preserving the principle of refusing to negotiate on political issues under threat, something on which unionists were certain, with good reason, to insist.
And then, after an initial cooling off period of three months, to move rapidly towards getting the talks under way while Gerry Adams's position still remained strong vis a vis hardliners in the IRA.
Unhappily, the British allowed various pressures to deflect them from such a course. Instead of acting rapidly and decisively they took 21 months to move through a series of changes of position.
First, they wanted all weapons decommissioned before the talks started.
Then they wanted some weapons decommissioned before the talks.
Subsequently they agreed to leave this on one side for the moment and to commission the Mitchell report.
Next, on the publication of this report, and apparently reacting to a leak of the document which they attributed to the Irish side, they appeared to reject it in the Commons. Why? Because Sir Patrick Mayhew said: "I happen to know that the unionists will not be there on the terms that have been put forward by Mitchell."
This was an unjustified assertion, as I pointed out in this column at the time, and as has now been demonstrated by the willingness of unionists to attend the talks on precisely this basis on Monday.
Then, after this had been followed by the resumption of IRA violence with the Canary Wharf bomb, the British government announced a radical shift in its position to one of requiring that decommissioning be addressed at the start of the talks.
Finally, quite recently they agreed that this issue be allowed to remain unsettled during the first three months of the talks.
The effect of all this has been to weaken greatly Gerry Adams's position vis a vis hardline IRA leaders. Two years ago, he persuaded them that there would be a rapid and positive British response to a cessation of violence, and the British have since proved him wrong.
MOREOVER the repeated changes of position by the British government must have encouraged the IRA to believe that the two governments might eventually cave in to their demands. This must have made it very difficult for the IRA to understand that there has always been a bottom line beyond which neither government can or will go, over a cessation of violence and parallel decommissioning during talks.
The fact that British willingness to drop the precondition of decommissioning before the talks was not disclosed until after the Canary Wharf bomb must have greatly strengthened the hands of those in the IRA who believe that the British will respond only to violence.
Much of this damaging catalogue of errors no doubt reflects the pressures under which the British government has been operating. First, there has been the pressure from unionists. This arises not so much from the Conservatives' narrow majority as from the vital importance of ensuring that when the talks open in two days there will actually be unionists there to talk with at least the SDLP.
But there has also been pressure from Conservative right wing backbenchers, some of whom are both Europhobe and unionist. And internal pressure has not, I suspect, been confined to backbenchers. Within the cabinet there are a number of ministers who are unsympathetic to this whole exercise, including Lord Cranborne.
Michael Howard, as Home Secretary responsible for prisons, has clearly been most unhelpful. And Sir Patrick Mayhew does not seem to have lived up to his reputation of being a stalwart Major supporter. On more than one occasion he has made statements that have seemed designed to block the Prime Minister.
Margaret Thatcher was much more dominant in cabinet than has ever been possible for John Major. However, I was struck more than once during the 1983-1985 Anglo Irish negotiation by her evident nervousness about her ability to bring her cabinet with her on the proposed agreement. In John Major's case this must have been a much bigger problem.
Yet the dilatory handling of the preparations for these talks does not seem to be fully explained even by a combination of all these factors. I suspect that when the history of these events comes to be written, it will also be found that more than once during this period the British government took its eyes off the Northern Ireland ball.
That's for the historians. For the IRA, however, nursing grievances about the way the British government has acted is futile. Certain harsh realities now have 19 be faced. No British or Irish government is going to negotiate with it through its Sinn Fein proxies without a redeclared cessation of violence. Nor can such a negotiation take place on the basis that the IRA will decommission none of its arms until negotiations have ended to its satisfaction.
It may regard a demand for prior decommissioning as an unacceptable surrender. But a phased disarmament in parallel with the negotiations is patently no such thing. That is the essential point that it must grasp if it does not want to condemn itself to an indefinite future of failure and disillusionment.
