IT IS salutary, in the atmosphere of confusion and near despair which has followed Saturday's bomb in Manchester, to remember the short life and violent death of Thomas Begley. On October 23rd, 1993, Begley, a 23 year old unemployed man from Ardoyne, carried a bomb into a fish shop on the Shankill Road. It was a Saturday morning, unusually warm for the time of year, and the area was crowded with families out shopping.

The bomb was intended to strike at the leadership of the UDA but exploded prematurely. It killed 10 people, including women and small children, and injured more than 50 others. The attack seemed to push Northern Ireland closer than ever to civil war.

But it was Begley's funeral, and the decision of Gerry Adams to carry the coffin of the dead bomber, which sent shock waves reverberating in Dublin, London and the US. The image seemed to spell an end to hopes for an IRA ceasefire.

Expressions of revulsion against the IRA were extended to include anyone who had supped, however distantly, with its representatives. The attacks on John Hume were particularly vitriolic.

I do not want to draw up some ghoulish atrocity chart which compares the political damage inflicted by the Shankill bomb in 1993, with that of the explosion at the Arndale Centre on Saturday. Both were wholly immoral and cruel attacks on innocent people. But the atmosphere of fear and loathing which has followed Manchester is reminiscent of the political mood after the Shankill bomb, and there are lessons to be learnt from it.

It has now become quite acceptable to explain that, of course, Gerry Adams had to carry Begley's coffin. The Sinn Fein leader could not afford to distance himself from the IRA by disowning one of its volunteers, however disastrous the operation which had led to his death.

Albert Reynolds has told how he explained to John Major that if Adams had refused to carry the coffin, the Sinn Fein leader's credibility with his own people would have suffered and with it his ability to draw the IRA with him on the road to peace.

Maybe that is how it happened. But it certainly did not feel or look like that at the time.

The political pressures on the then Taoiseach were enormous. Not surprisingly perhaps, it seemed to many that Mr Reynolds was determined to distance himself not only from Gerry Adams but from the Sinn Fein leader's partner in the peace initiative, John Hume.

Sean Duignan, the Government press secretary, described in his diary how Mr Hume was told to butt out and how this dumping" on the SDLP leader by the Irish Government pleased the British.

It took angry protests at the subsequent Fianna Fail Ardfheis and an extraordinary outpouring of public support for John Hume to put the peace process back on track and to bring Gerry Adams back into the picture.

After last Saturday's bomb the air is loud with people ready to pronounce the peace process dead and to demand that Sinn Fein leader be put firmly back in the political isolation ward where he belongs.

The pressure are particularly, harsh on John Bruton because his on instincts have been to distrust Sinn Fein. But the Taoiseach has already shown considerable moral courage and determination in trying to understand the difficulties which face Gerry Adams in trying to draw the whole republican movement away from violence and into democratic politics.

Mr Bruton cares deeply about bringing peace to the island but it is essential that he does not falter now by giving way, either to his own anger at recent events, or to political demands that extra pressure should be put on Mr Adams.

That will take guts, which the Taoiseach does not lack. But it also requires a clear understanding of the historic task which Gerry Adams has undertaken. Over and over again, since this State achieved its independence, republican leaders have led their supporters away from violent revolutionary struggle and into politics. What has always happened is that they have left behind a dissident minority which has been able to regroup and to rebuild sufficient popular support to keep the campaign of violence going.

If that was true before the conflict in the North, the circumstances today are even bleaker. Even if Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein were to split from the IRA, as the Government seems to be asking them to do, the situation in the North the near certainty of a downward spiral of violence and repression would make a renewed IRA campaign more rather than less likely.

Gerry Adams is absolutely determined to avoid this happening. From the very beginning of his dialogue with John Hume almost a decade ago, he has made it clear that the worst possible outcome would be a split. His objective, as he has said over and over again, is to take all the guns out of Irish politics once and for all, something which would mean the final winding up of the IRA.

It may be that history will defeat Mr Adams, that the eradication of the physical force tradition so long entrenched in our political culture will not be possible in the time scale which is available to him. But his design offers the only hope of lasting peace for this island.

That is why it is politically destructive to keep pressing him to answer the two questions (I) Does Sinn Fein support the IRA's campaign of violence and (2) Has Mr Adams asked the IRA to call a cease fire?

All the evidence of reasonably cautious observers to whom I have spoken points to the fact that Adams and those close to him have been desperate to get a ceasefire and that the Sinn Fein leadership knows very well that the violence in Adare and Manchester has been politically catastrophic.

THE problem is that, for the same reasons that propelled Mr Adams to carry Thomas Begley's coffin, the Sinn Fein leader is not in a position to say so. He is being squeezed from all sides and has almost no room to manoeuvre, on or off the airwaves.

Like most people, I would be extremely critical of many aspects of Sinn Fein's handling of the peace process. They have been politically inflexible, slow to understand the legitimate fears of unionists and quite offensively ungenerous in their failure to recognise the efforts that have been made by other politicians to meet their concerns.

The violence in Adare and Manchester is the more depressing because it comes at a time when there were already signs of real movement by other parties to the conflict, notably the Ulster Unionists. We are still left with a truth which is as difficult and obstinate as when Father Alex Reid and others took the first tentative steps to try to build an inclusive peace process.

Without Sinn Fein and the IRA we are not going to have a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. Gerry Adams is trying to draw a line under a long and terrible chapter in our history. It is a project which still deserves support.