JUST when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, the jetty collapses. On Friday afternoon last, it was hard to escape an awful, mournful sense of dij` vu, as the word came in on the mojo wire that the new devolved institutions of governance in Northern Ireland had been suspended, and direct rule from Britain reimposed. It was a day of high drama and low emotions a day when time ran out on those people who had genuinely and sincerely been attempting to find a way forward through the grim constitutional complexities posed by the North s tortured past.
Who is to blame? David Trimble for setting an impossible deadline? Peter Mandelson for dancing to the Unionist tune? Or Sinn Fiin and the IRA for failing to come up with any meaningful offer on decommissioning in time? A bit of each is probably the fairest answer. There is no doubt that Gerry Adams has a point when he says that the deadline set by David Trimble in itself represents an attempt to re-negotiate the Belfast Agreement. Deadlines had been contained within the agreement itself, and the decommissioning body, under the entirely impartisan chairmanship of General John de Chastelain, was charged with the responsibility of overseeing that these would be met in a way that was satisfactory. So what was the purpose of the earlier, arbitrary deadline effectively imposed on everyone involved in the process by David Trimble and the Ulster Unionists? It s easy to see how this unilateral action would be interpreted by Sinn Fiin as a pre-emptive, bullying tactic. And one that was impossible to meet: how do you sell it to the IRA, that Unionists are to have the right to exercise a veto over the institutions of government, so painstakingly agonised over by so many well-motivated people for so long?
This is the nub of the problem. The various parties, including the Ulster Unionist party, signed on to the terms of the Belfast Agreement. It is not surprising that an attempt to renegotiate those terms would be seen by Sinn Fiin and by the IRA as, literally, an act of treachery. It is a word they are too familiar with by far: treachery. And Republicans don t like it the number of their own who have been consigned brutally to an early (and frequently unmarked) grave in its name bears terrible, mute testament to just how desperately they don t like it. Curiously, for an illegal organisation, the IRA are fiercely legalistic. You do a deal, you stick by it. Mess with the deal and all bets are off.
But of course David Trimble and the Ulster Unionists are prisoners of their past. Watching Trimble run the gauntlet of naked hatred and hostility at successive Unionist party showdowns you are reminded afresh of just how visceral are the twisted passions of Northern politics.
The same is true on the Republican side. The backwoods men (and women) of South Armagh are getting itchy fingers. Hatred runs deep there too, honed to a fine intensity by the presence of observation towers, armoured vehicles and British army personnel. A gesture on decommissioning made under duress from David Trimble might be enough to unleash the worst these boys have to offer.
Nor are Sinn Fiin s problems isolated to the border areas, or indeed to their past. During the week two men were convicted of occasioning actual bodily harm to Alan Byrne in Basin Lane in Dublin in May 1996; in a related incident at the time, Josie Dwyer, a heroin addict who had contracted AIDS, was killed by a mob of so-called anti-drugs activists. Both men, who were convicted and sentenced to terms in jail, were members of Sinn Fiin at the time of the assault. Both had criminal records. Ronnie Byrne was twice convicted of the kind of crime for which the IRA have been known to kneecap people: in 1975 and 1977, he was found guilty of travelling in a stolen car. He was also found guilty of burglary. And twice he was convicted of assault.
The younger of the two men found guilty, Stephen Carney, was even more active . Since 1990, there d been three counts of larceny and attempted larceny and one act of receiving stolen goods. That was before he switched over to the Real IRA: he was also one of the six-man gang that was taken by the Garda Emergency Response Unit, after an abortive attempt to rob a security van in Ashford, Co Wicklow in 1998, and is already serving an eight year sentence for his involvement in that crime.
These two convictions confirm what many people had long argued: that some at least of the hard men of Sinn Fiin, active in grass-roots community politics and in the anti-drugs movement, are in fact low level thugs who are in the organisation for the veneer of legitimacy that it gives their psychopathic tendencies. It is not possible to say that a criminal record, like those outlined here, automatically identifies an individual as a fascist and a bully-boy. But that poisonous spirit has certainly been evident in the activities of the self-styled community anti-drugs activists and in particular the IRA front, Direct Action Against Drugs.
Reading about the convictions, I was struck by just how deeply-rooted the problems faced by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are, in attempting to change the culture of violence in which Sinn Fiin and the IRA have been steeped. In this respect, it was telling that Stephen Carney had made the switch to the Real IRA . With volunteers like that in and about their ranks, it s no wonder that the Provisional leadership feels that it has to move ahead with decommissioning only with extreme care. Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Pat Doherty and others may be prisoners of the hard men in ways that even they find shockingly difficult to deal with.
It doesn t give much grounds for optimism and yet there is, potentially, a way forward. Decommissioning by the IRA, on their own, is too much to demand. But if a gesture from the IRA can be matched by a similarly significant move towards demilitarisation by the British army, and by an orchestrated parallel decommissioning act by loyalist paramilitaries, then that may just be saleable at grass roots level.
Sinn Fiin and the IRA have come a long way. They now need help to go one vital step further. It should be forthcoming, if we really want to get the gun permanently out of Irish, or Northern Irish, politics.