The Unionists really will have to exercise unusual ingenuity to come up with a further reason for delaying the peace process now the IRA has allowed its arms dumps to be inspected. For Gerry Adams is speaking the literal truth when he says the act of inspection was "unprecedented".

Even after the Civil War ended in defeat and disaster, the IRA merely dumped its arms. Again in 1962, when that Border campaign ended, what became the Official IRA did not hand over a round of ammunition, merely issued a statement saying "All arms and other materials have been dumped".

The authorities in the Republic fully understand that when arms are dumped they stay dumped, and a police superintendent once told me how he disposed of the conundrum posed by the fact that he had been given information as to the whereabouts of a cache of arms.

"On the one hand my duty was clear. I knew about the whereabouts of illegal lethal weapons. On the other, if I went about things formally I would have had to charge the decent man whose land had been used for the dump and there would have been all kinds of repercussions about informers, troubles with the guards and so on. So one dark night I put the sacks into a boat, rowed to the deepest part of Lake X. . . and dumped them."

Something of this pragmatic approach was echoed by Garda Commissioner Pat Byrne in his article for the Irish News, which The Irish Times reprinted on March 14th. Byrne said, obviously with the consent and knowledge of the Government:

"The consensus we have come to is that unfortunately you will always have some type of `IRA' while you have a British presence in Northern Ireland. I'm not making a case for them. As long as people realise that that's the way it's going to be.

"If we could turn the clock back, I wonder would those wisest among us have insisted that this [decommissioning] is an issue that had to be dealt with before political progress could be continued or maintained or established."

The answer, of course, is that they would not. Decommissioning was a nonsense. The IRA could have handed in its stock of weaponry and replenished it in the morning. There is a lot of guff talked about Libyan arms. Of my knowledge, I can say that even today the IRA could get all the weapons it wanted from the US. The world is awash with weaponry at the end of the Cold War. Even surprising countries like Sweden could be tapped if one knew how to go about it.

The point was always the substance of the ceasefire, not the style of decommissioning. The IRA viewed handing over arms as an effort to humiliate it, to be able to say it had surrendered, and that was not going to happen.

Even back in the Civil War days, when Eamon de Valera issued his "Soldiers of the Republic, Legion of the Rearguard" call to cease fighting, he said: "Other means must be sought to safeguard the nation's right."

People in the intelligence community like Commissioner Byrne know that the IRA has chosen "other means" to pursue its goals. Among the IRA supporters one can detect two clear messages. One: no decommissioning. The other: no return to war.

The thinking republicans are aware that the enormous political gains they have made by declaring the ceasefire would be lost by a return to violence. They also know that the future is with Sinn Fein, at least in Northern Ireland.

The next census in the North is next April and will probably show a nationalist population of about 47 per cent. This is roughly the same figure as for the nine counties of Ulster back when partition was being planned, and which caused James Craig to reject Lloyd George's offer of all nine Ulster counties because, as he said frankly, six was all they could control.

Control was the operative word of the unionists' governing philosophies subsequently. We do not hear much of words like discrimination or gerrymandering nowadays but they lay behind the outbreak of the Troubles.

Now with a majority of the children in the greater Belfast area being born to nationalists and the Queen's University student population standing at around 63 per cent and rising, Sinn Fein sees the spin-off in its growing percentage of the vote.

The nationalist vote as a whole is going up, with Sinn Fein increasingly gaining the lion's share. The unionist vote has gone down to roughly 50 per cent in recent elections and will drop at an accelerating rate. The 1991 census showed that over a third of Presbyterians, the largest Protestant church, were over 75 while the nationalists were in a majority in the younger age group.

In the circumstances, decommissioning was merely a Canute ploy. But it was a dangerous one. The reality is that although nothing like this has ever happened before, the IRA does not apply for planning permission before building an arms dump.

Unquestionably the dumps which President Martti Ahtisaari and Mr Cyril Ramaphosa inspected will never be used again by the IRA. But it is a reasonable speculation that other dumps may have been applied for under the IRA planning act.

Everyone knows this. But what everyone should also take note of is a line in the report of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning report of February 11th. This, it will be recalled, said the then IRA offer "holds out the real prospect of an agreement".

The Taoiseach agreed with Gen de Chastelain and his colleagues and wrote an article for this paper, making a veiled attack on Peter Mandelson's destruction of the institutions.

However, that report also stated "that the question of British forces and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland must be addressed". They must indeed, and along with them the question of resuscitating Patten's report which Mandelson also placed on a life-support machine, and implementing the reform of the criminal justice system, to say nothing of fulfilling the Good Friday agreement commitments on equality.

Therefore, while the inspection breakthrough is literally that, a breakthrough both in the contemporary situation and in terms of historical attitude to be welcomed, particularly in the short term for its potential in defusing what was looking like an increasingly nasty situation over Drumcree, the peace process is not yet a done deal.

The IRA and the Sinn Fein leadership have stretched themselves, to a greater degree than they will admit publicly. There is a split in the republican movement, as the dead of Omagh and the recent meeting of the 32-County Sovereignty Committee remind us. This moment should not be lost. To use a much abused term, it does provide us with a historical opportunity.

Tim Pat Coogan, a former editor of the Irish Press, is the author of The IRA, the definitive history of the organisation, an updated version of which is to be published next month by Harper Collins. His latest book, Wherever Green Is Worn, the story of the Irish diaspora, will be published in the autumn by Hutchinson