In the statement announcing its ceasefire, the Irish National Liberation Army invokes the name of "our founder, Seamus Costello" and cites a quotation from him about the Irish working class: "We are nothing and we shall be everything."

Costello, a charismatic figure who spearheaded the split from the Official IRA and Sinn Fein that led to the foundation of the INLA and its political counterpart, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, was shot dead in Dublin in 1977 at the age of 38 under circumstances that still remain a mystery.

In addition to his formidable reputation in republican circles as a "boy general" who first took up the gun as a teenager in the 1950s campaign, Costello was also a skilled political agitator who was an elected councillor in Co Wicklow and led a high-profile campaign to promote public access to "private" beaches in his native county.

Costello was pragmatic on such issues as taking seats in Leinster House.

It may seem a strange parallel, but in his combination of militancy and social activism he was not unlike some of the new leaders who have emerged in Belfast loyalism in more recent times.

As a republican with very strong roots among the ordinary people, Costello would arguably have agreed with the INLA's decision to respect the vote of the vast majority, North and South, in favour of the Belfast Agreement, although he would undoubtedly have had major reservations about the Good Friday document.

As a guerrilla activist reputed to be both skilful and competent in that stark and deadly sphere, Costello would undoubtedly have been dismayed over the years by what the INLA statement calls the "faults and grievous errors in our prosecution of the war".

Coming from the same left-wing republican tradition as Frank Ryan and James Connolly, it can certainly be argued that he would have approved of the sentiments in the statement where it says: "It is now time to silence the guns and allow the working classes the time and opportunity to advance their demands and their needs."

Costello reportedly concluded after the 1950s campaign that the reason it failed was not the absence of popular support but the lack of popular involvement.

There is no mass base for an IRA-style campaign in Northern Ireland now. Nationalists have voted in overwhelming numbers for a historic compromise with their unionist neighbours.

Moderate nationalists have been arguing for years that the IRA campaign, far from promoting the liberation of the nationalists, was in fact oppressing them.

Fifteen of the 28 dead at Omagh were from a nationalist background, a higher death-toll than Bloody Sunday.

It could even be the case that some of the dead who were old enough to do so cast their vote for Mr Terence Brogan, of Sinn Fein, in his spectacular win in last winter's Omagh District Council by-election.

The placing of bombs in public places, with the inevitable risk to the lives of ordinary folk, was not something IRA activists in previous generations would have been enthusiastic about.

As James Connolly wrote: "Ireland without her people is nothing to me." Indeed, the decision by the 1916 rebels to surrender was taken in order to prevent further loss of civilian life.

In view of the fact that all republican paramilitary groups except the Continuity IRA are now on ceasefire, are we seeing the end of republican paramilitarism for good?

That is probably an unwarranted conclusion. There is still a hard core of activists who will simply regard the Omagh bomb as a "bad accident", the same view that they took about Enniskillen, and seek to continue to campaign against what are called economic targets.

There will always be an element in republicanism simply unable to swallow the compromises in the Belfast Agreement, which they see as copperfastening partition. But will they conduct their opposition by democratic means, as the INLA has promised to do, or will they continue using the bomb and the bullet?

It is probably naive to expect that determined men and women with a long history of paramilitary activity are suddenly going to turn into convinced adherents of non-violent methods.

In his seminal work, The Secret Army, J. Bowyer Bell writes of the republican faithful gathering beside Wolfe Tone's grave at Bodenstown each year. Earlier on, the "ministerial Mercedes and tailored colonels" would have left an official wreath or two, but now another army materialises out of the surrounding countryside, "an army without banners of victory, without uniforms and, in most years, without prospects".

It seems that even the vast weight of state repression and the nearunanimous odium of the public will never quite eradicate militant republicanism because, in Bowyer Bell's words, these people march to martial pipes that are "audible only to the faithful".

But, after Omagh, the possibility of mass support for their actions at any time in the future seems highly remote.