AS the all party talks resume at Stormont under the chairmanship of the former US senator Mr George Mitchell, two prestigious publications here have carried articles highly critical of Sinn Fein and the IRA.
In the Sunday New York Times, Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien writes that "the Hume Adams alliance is increasingly strained".
Mr Hume's reply to a proposed electoral pact between Sinn Fein and the SDLP had been "colder than anything he has said to Sinn Fein since the beginning of the peace process more than five years ago".
In the article called "A Peace Process as Deadly as War", Dr O'Brien says that Mr Hume's second condition - that Sinn Fein drop its traditional policy of abstention at Westminster - "must have alarmed Sinn Fein and the IRA".
Mr Hume, he adds, "made this call in an astringent manner which must have surprised Sinn Fein after all these years of emolliency".
Sinn Fein had rejected Mr Hume's demand that its members take their seats in parliament, but his words "will reverberate".
With the decline of the peace process, paramilitary violence was increasingly seen as a matter to be handled by the security forces rather than by negotiations.
Dr O'Brien says that "this development is much to be welcomed". He continues: "But unhappily, the bad habits produced by the peace process linger on, even as the process itself is in decay. Thus Prime Minister Bruton, in denouncing the attacks on Northern Ireland's High Court, calls for the unequivocal and irrevocable, of ceasefire."
Criticising this as "nonsense", as the IRA ceasefire had never been "unequivocal", Dr O'Brien says that "a little lingering nonsense in the air is a small price to pay for the elimination of a dangerously seductive peace process which has been worked by the IRA for its own benefit".
The conservative weekly magazine National Review has a picture of a smiling Mr Gerry Adams on its cover to signal an interview with Sean O'Callaghan, the former IRA member.
The interview with Mr O'Callaghan has already been published in London by the Guardian. In a leading article, the editor, Mr John O'Sullivan, writes that whenever the magazine "publishes an article critical of the Irish Republican Army we receive hurt letters from Irish Americans who think of the IRA as the romantic vanguard of Irish identity".
After the O'Callaghan interview "no one can have any excuse for seeing the Provisional IRA in any sort of romantic light", the article says.
Mr O'Sullivan, a former RTE correspondent in London, says that the Provos have been "marketing various smears" against Mr O'Callaghan and "what is disturbing about these charges is the light they throw on Irish political and journalistic culture informing on terrorists is felt to be something shameful, when in truth it falls note far short of a public duty".
Having met Mr O'Callaghan recently in London, Mr O'Sullivan says he will be applying shortly for a US visa, but "because of his past involvement in terrorism that will need a State Department waiver of the kind granted to Gerry Adams".