The drumbeat for IRA decommissioning by the Ulster Unionist Party meeting date of February 12th began in earnest last week. The drum tattoo has a very familiar roll to it. First the right-wing British broadsheets announce an event involving decommissioning is going to happen imminently. One announced that "the IRA has invited Gen John de Chastelain to witness a controlled explosion of its weaponry later this month".

No source was given but much of the rest of the media rushed in to pass judgment that it was true.

The story was widely picked up and before we knew it, a full hue and cry ensued, with the British and Irish governments and political parties in Northern Ireland sucked into the vortex, issuing rapid-fire statements as if some imminent development was on hand. That the original story was utterly inaccurate hardly seemed to matter.

As we have seen often in the past when it comes to Northern Ireland, any slapdash combination of rumour, innuendo and make-believe can cause a crisis in the peace process. But unless we can establish the underlying facts of the current impasse, we are in danger of a dangerous escalation of hype over reality.

The good news is that the IRA is co-operating with the de Chastelain commission and that strenuous efforts are being made to ensure a positive interim report from the general later this month. I believe that will be accomplished. However, Sinn FΘin never agreed to the Trimble February deadline for any IRA decommissioning in meetings with Senator George Mitchell and the Ulster Unionists.

Neither was it part of any agreement that those three parties made at the conclusion of the Mitchell review. It was added later by David Trimble as a way of relieving pressure on him before the Ulster Unionist Council vote. While Trimble may have found it necessary to set the new deadline in terms of his own survival, actual decommissioning in any form, however limited, was never going to be accomplished in such a short timeframe. He was fully aware of that during the Mitchell review deliberations.

A road map to a satisfactory conclusion of the arms issue was worked out during the Mitchell review and David Trimble agreed with it. However, Trimble immediately threw away the blueprint when he imposed new conditions soon after the review was concluded. Trimble has somehow become a hero for reneging on his agreement with Mitchell and Sinn FΘin. That inconvenient fact has been ignored or glossed over by the Trimble boosters.

Worse, there has been a widespread assumption that the republican movement must now adjust to the changed circumstances and deliver for David. That is, most assuredly, not what is foremost in most republican minds at present. The reality is that any decision on even an ounce of Semtex destroyed needs the approval of a full IRA convention. That is simply not forthcoming at the present time. It is likely that if the IRA leadership tried to push it, a split would result. Even successive British governments have acknowledged that the IRA must remain intact for prospects of a lasting peace to endure.

A hasty decision on decommissioning helps nobody but enemies of the peace process. The decision by the IRA to appoint an interlocutor to the arms decommissioning body was a massive step for that body. There are many within that organisation who hew to the original terms of the engagement and agreements with the British government, during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then decommissioning was never raised and a prospect of an honourable peace with no talk of surrender or defeat was on offer.

Thus, by its very engagement with de Chastelain, the IRA has moved forward, by its own lights, in a remarkable fashion. Any attempt to rush those fences, to impose arbitrary deadlines, will fail. That is what has been attempted in recent weeks. The IRA will end its war on its own terms.

It will likely be a call to dump arms, as has been used before, in previous campaigns. It will only occur after an IRA convention votes for such a conclusion. I believe we are still some time away from such an event. A call to dump arms and a role for the decommissioning commission in ensuring that those weapons are out of use are not mutually exclusive aims.

With goodwill and fair political winds, both can be accomplished, but certainly not by February 12th. The key issues of the fate of the Patten Commission and the demilitarisation of Northern Ireland are still on the table. How they are resolved will have a major bearing on the IRA decision-making process. It is time, too, it was made clear by the two governments that Gen de Chastelain is in charge of decommissioning, not David Trimble.

For the IRA to have total confidence in him he must be seen to control his own issue, as George Mitchell and Chris Patten did, and that he is not subject to whatever political winds are blowing.

There are also logistical nightmares for the IRA and de Chastelain to consider. Contrary to media reports, much of the weaponry is not in dumps but in safe houses all over the two states. The spectre of republican families all over the island being evicted while floorboards are ripped up is just one of the nightmare scenarios that internal opponents of decommissioning, not unreasonably, raise.

So it is clear that the IRA must move very carefully and judiciously. The dynamic that brought the IRA ceasefires, still by far the greatest accomplishment of the peace process, was one that allowed the IRA to reach its own conclusion in its own way that it was time to give politics a chance. It is also clear that in present circumstances, with two Sinn FΘin ministers in government and a raft of other favourable political changes such as the cross-Border bodies under way, the time for the IRA to write finis to this campaign cannot be far distant.

But timing is everything, and any attempt to pre-empt a process that has resulted in the greatest opportunity for peace in a generation could be catastrophic. Significantly, Sinn FΘin leaders in New York last week spoke about how the Belfast Agreement contained for them the seeds of an eventual united Ireland.

They should be allowed the time and space to convince the IRA similarly, as they appear to be doing, that such is the case. Arbitrary deadlines imposed by fiat of an Ulster Unionist leader or the right-wing Tory press are no substitute for working through the political realities.

Niall O'Dowd is publisher of the Irish Voice in New York.