A week has passed since ETA ended its 14-month truce. Yet the group, which has pursued Basque independence through violent means for 30 years, has carried out no new attacks.
Yesterday, two senior members of Herri Batasuna, the political party close, in Belfast parlance, to the thinking of ETA, came to Dublin to talk to Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein and the media about this new and rather shadowy phase in the Basque peace process.
Ms Jone Gorizelaia, a Basque parliamentarian, and Mr Pernando Barrena, a spokesperson for HB's central committee, both insist that neither their party, nor ETA, wants to impose its position on anyone else. While they say they cannot speak for ETA, they believe its end-of-truce statement has been misinterpreted.
"ETA is not saying `things must be done our way or not at all'," says Mr Barrena. "It is simply putting forward its proposal for a new type of Basque sovereignty, and asking other parties to put forward theirs."
The difference, of course, is that ETA's proposal comes giftwrapped with a threat to resume a violent campaign which has taken hundreds of lives. This raises questions familiar from Northern Ireland. How can any democrats negotiate under the tutelage of an armed organisation? Doesn't the implicit authoritarianism of ETA's position make dialogue very difficult?
"You may be partly right in what you say," says Mr Barrena carefully. "But in the time since ETA announced it was ending its truce, and without any armed action, the political process in the Basque Country has accelerated notably.
"What ETA has done is like banging the table and saying, `Something more must be done!' What really upsets the Madrid parties is not ETA, but the new Basque nationalist project that lies behind all this."
He is referring to fresh commitments last week from more moderate Basque nationalists to pursue the goal of "sovereignty" from the Spanish and French states. But does this mean that ETA will issue a new threat every time it feels things are not moving fast enough?
Such questions lead Ms Gorizelaia to expound the sadly familiar theory of the "two violences". Madrid and Paris, she says, did not stop their repression for a single day during the truce. Basque prisoners are still isolated and still held in prisons several hundred miles from home. Militants were arrested - and, she alleges, tortured - throughout the ceasefire period.
"Armed struggle is not a caprice of ETA," says Mr Barrena. "We argue that there is a democratic deficit in the Basque Country. Arzallus [the moderate nationalist leader] has said he would exchange the Basque Autonomy Statute for the Stormont Agreement. Why? Because although Stormont has very little power, the fundamental thing is assured. That is, the capacity of Irish citizens to decide their relations with each other, and with other states.
"A declaration from Madrid that it would accept the will of the Basque people, freely expressed, would create a situation where political violence would disappear."
Even if a referendum vote went against independence?
"We will put our proposal forward, but we will accept whatever the people decide," says Ms Gorizelaia.
Reuters adds: Herri Batasuna yesterday urged the Irish Government to help resolve the crisis.