SURELY they have at least one more cease-fire left in them", a veteran political commentator observed privately yesterday, after yet another largely unproductive Sinn Fein election press conference in North Belfast.
The sixth sense of most experienced observers in the North, after a hectic week of conflicting signals and rhetoric, deduces that there is indeed a strong possibility of some form of IRA initiative in the offing.
But it will be the last powerful gambit available to republicans in advance of the crucial June 10th political watershed, and there will be a lot of gruelling calculation put into a decision to risk it.
Even now, at secret conclaves somewhere, the pros and cons will be under dissection. The timing, of course, will be crucial and the precise nature of the IRA demarche will be debated minutely.
On past form, it will have unexpected elements. It must anticipate certain inevitable consequences. If it is indeed to be a cessation announcement of some kind, it will promptly be challenged by unionists and British politicians in regard to its reliability and extent.
The immediate demand, once again, will be for proof of permanence. We have been through that sterile debate ad nauseam in 1994 and it proved intractable. Demands for absolute certainty have proved as futile in the Northern situation as in any other arena of human affairs.
Common sense should have taught us by now that it is impossible to master the future and the best chance to influence it lies in seizing pragmatically the opportunities presented by today's circumstances.
Common sense and pragmatism are still not negotiable currencies in the North, however, and we will undoubtedly be obliged to endure a recirculation of all the old shibboleths. That prospect, indeed, may be a significant factor deterring an IRA decision.
Despite the carping and the sparring of recent days, it remains obvious that the June 10th assignation for all-party talks will open a vital new opportunity for Northern politics to rise out of the morass.
The Sinn Fein leadership desperately wants to be there, having campaigned persistently and expended enormous personal energy on the achievement of this goal. Because the governments are solidly resolved on the ceasefire condition, the IRA alone can provide the entrance ticket.
Failure to do so will devalue any future effort to achieve round table talks, will uncouple and dishearten US and international goodwill, disappoint public opinion at large and possibly turn the clock back 25 years.
In the past week, the British Prime Minister untypically, it should be noted has taken a significant step aimed specifically at allaying republican suspicions that they are merely being enticed into a decommissioning thumbscrew.
Mr John Major's key assertion, that agreement should be reached on how to implement the Mitchell recommendations "without blocking the negotiations" is on the record now as the first broad procedural principle for the negotiations. That is a substantial advance, and yesterday the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, appeared to acknowledge cautiously. He said there had been a positive shift in the rhetoric of the British Prime Minister.
Mr Adams added. "And if he is serious, if he genuinely wants to make sure that this issue doesn't become a block on negotiations on political issues, constitutional issues, democratic rights, the prisoners and all the other matters, then of course Sinn Fein will seek to meet him halfway."
This admission, carefully hedged with a crucial proviso, represented nonetheless a glimmer of positive movement at the end of a week of confusion and ill-founded speculation.
Prominent reports in British Sunday newspapers last weekend sparked off the torrent of speculation and several coincidental events subsequently gave it momentum. One newspaper, quoting security sources, said the IRA was preparing for a complete cease-fire another said it was set for a return to full-scale hostilities.
They might have been discounted as wild journalistic guesses that cancelled each other out had not Mr Martin McGuinness, coincidentally, been lined up already for a British television interview the same day. In the course of that, he seemed to hint at leeway and conceded that the negotiations needed to take place in a peaceful environment.
On Monday morning, Mr Adams was moved to issue a rebuttal of the newspaper reports, stating that, in his opinion, an IRA cease fire was not imminent "at this time".
Even as his statement rolled off the fax machines, the Northern Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, was being invited to respond to the remarks of Mr McGuinness and made what seemed to be a gesture to specific republican concerns by declaring that, of course, the negotiations would have an open agenda, with "nothing preordained, nothing ruled in and nothing ruled out".
Meanwhile, Mr McGuinness disappeared from the stage and the Sinn Fein national chairman, Mr Mitchel McLaughlin, was wheeled out to bat in a series of television and radio network interviews in the course of which he, in turn, made mildly approving noises about Sir Patrick's comments.
Quite coincidentally, the same weekend had seen also reports emerge from Washington of strong statements by key Irish-American politicians and Clinton administration officials urging a new IRA ceasefire.
A rapid series of unrelated, had now begun to feed off each other and generate a common momentum. The vacuum of hard information inevitably magnified the significance attached to the speculation.
Yet there was a real process of movement in train much more slowly and deliberately in the political engine rooms. It culminated in Mr Major's carefully tailored direct message to the republican movement in his Irish Times article on Thursday.
The fact that this message was decided upon, assembled and sent, is probably at least as important as its content. Both aspects will be deeply influential but not necessarily decisive in the internal IRA deliberations which must deliver a decision within days rather than weeks.
