Mr Gerry Adams has said no to Mr John Major. He has said no to Mr Bruton. Now he says no to Mr John Hume. Yesterday's rocket attack in Belfast reinforced the message. All are out of step except Sinn Fein and the IRA. There would be something laughable, if the situation were not so laden with doom. For whether he acknowledges it or not, Mr Adams's intransigence puts his commitment to peace fundamentally in question. He could not make such an uncompromising stand, rejecting all reasonable democratic norms, if he were not backed by the threat and use of mass violence by the IRA.
That threat, as he knows, is resisted not by the two governments alone, not only by the various brands of unionism, but by the majority of nationalists as well. From the start, the Sinn Fein strategy has been to build a nationalist consensus, including the SDLP and the Government in Dublin. When Dublin has refused to dance to the Provos tune, Mr Adams has dug in, rather than seeking to explore what might be done to bring his own position closer to that of the majority of nationalists, north and south of the Border. Mr Mitchel McLaughlin, the chairman of Sinn Fein, only last weekend loosed a broadside against the Taoiseach for his "misunderstandings, mistakes and failures" in dealing with the British and the unionists - as if Sinn Fein had not distinguished itself as a sponsor of hatred and sectarianism as and when it has suited its purposes.
Mr Adams's reply to Mr Hume's conditions for an electoral pact between Sinn Fein and the SDLP must not be surprising given the Provisionals' refusal to accept consensus as other than a falling into line with unreconstructed republicanism. In his 30 years as a leader of Northern nationalism, Mr Hume has shown the value of seats at Westminster for the nationalist case, albeit less effectively than might have been because of Sinn Fein intervention to split the vote in some constituencies. Yet for Mr Adams it would be "preposterous" for Sinn Fein to change its current policy, either by allowing the SDLP to put up candidates alone, or by ending the abstentionist policy.
There is more shortsightedness than sense in that policy. But it is in his reply on the question of a complete end to IRA violence, which Mr Hume also required as a condition for an electoral pact, that Mr Adams demonstrated how tightly his hands are tied by the IRA and how remote he is from the reality of politics as it must be if Sinn Fein is ever to have a hand in a negotiated peace. The SDLP had rejected "any feasible electoral arrangement", "any realistic strategy to reverse the anomaly of unionists misrepresenting nationalist constituencies". That this strategy would require thousands of nationalists who have suffered at the hands of IRA and loyalist gunmen to endorse an agenda they repudiate does not apparently enter his head. Yet Sinn Fein proclaims that it has rejected force and is committed to the democratic process. Can it continue to say so now?
Mr Hume spoke of the "greater nationalist interest" in his article in the Sunday Independent. Nobody is better entitled to use such language, or to criticise the British government's role in the present impasse. But Sinn Fein, as it thrashes round to find someone to blame, seems impervious to any suggestion that its own vaunted "analysis and strategy" have helped to back it into the margins. In its reply on violence and abstentionism it has shown itself the prisoner of ghostly voices from the past, the inheritor of positions in which its leaders - much less the ordinary people of this island - have had no say. The vast majority looks for something better.