Connect: Mitchel McLaughlin's remark on this week's Questions & Answers that the IRA's killing of Jean McConville in 1972 was not a crime has rightly been condemned. Even allowing for his belief in the sovereign legitimacy of an IRA "at war", states, no more than individuals, cannot have the moral right to kill defenceless people against their will. Legal rights are, of course, another matter.
The IRA maintains it killed Jean McConville because it believed her to be an informer and thus a combatant. Opponents say the 37-year-old mother of 10 was murdered because she comforted a dying British soldier. Somebody's either lying or deluded.
Either way, the ensuing row discloses clashes between moral and legal rights and the ambiguities of the word "crime".
Does "crime" simply mean an offence against the law or does the word have a broader meaning to include any wicked act? After all, Jews who did not wear a yellow Star of David in Nazi Germany were breaking the law. As such, it can be argued, they were committing a crime but most people would acknowledge that in that case the law itself was the criminal.
Curiously, Michael McDowell's assertion in response to a question from McLaughlin that Bobby Sands was a criminal has escaped almost all media analysis. Legally, of course, McDowell is right: Sands was a criminal in so far as he was convicted of illegally possessing arms. Yet his supporters would argue that the system which formed and convicted him was the moral criminal. Northern Ireland was not Nazi Germany, but neither was it a model of political fairness. Sands soon met the sectarianism of Belfast life. Intimidation forced him out of the predominantly working-class unionist Rathcoole estate and later out of his apprenticeship as a coach builder. His adulthood coincided with the bloody 1970s and he spent nine of his 27 years in jail.
By McDowell's reasoning, Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Eamon de Valera were criminals too. Likewise, Eoin MacNeill, McDowell's grandfather - who, after the 1916 Rising, was arrested and sentenced to penal servitude for life. Although MacNeill was released under the following year's general amnesty, he had, albeit briefly, legally been a criminal.
Moral arguments are never as simple as Maggie Thatcher's hectoring if legally admissible and simplistic motto that "a crime is a crime is a crime". Under that dictum, children hanged for stealing bread in earlier centuries could not be victims but perpetrators. Indeed, such politically opportunist exaltation of the law can ultimately justify all abuses of morality.
Despite attempts to separate law and politics, there's inevitably a political element to the law. Hence it differs across history and geography: law in 1905 differs from law in 2005 and law in China differs from law in the west. It changes - usually more slowly than societal values - but it does change. Therefore, strict conformity to the letter rather than the spirit of the law can render it immoral.
Anyway, back to McLaughlin, McDowell and Sands. Both McLaughlin and McDowell appear destined for the history books - but expect them to slide quickly into the footnotes. Bobby Sands, on the other hand, will endure. He will be mythologised and demonised but the sheer gravity of what he did has a human significance which transcends this small island.
Legally, of course, he was a criminal but there are far larger moral issues involved. While the young Sands was living in a strife-torn society, the young McDowell, just three years older, was attending Gonzaga College, then UCD and later King's Inns. The most striking similarity in their lives is that both became parliamentary representatives: Sands as an MP and McDowell as a TD.
But their paths to political office had been conspicuously different: sectarian, working-class Belfast versus comfortable, middle-class Dublin; a truncated apprenticeship versus a fee-paying secondary education; learning Irish in a H-Block versus law at King's Inns. You cannot blame people for their backgrounds but when the economically privileged call those less so "criminal", it begs profound questions.
The word, after all, has understandably pejorative connotations. But in the case of an Irish republican hunger striker, it is a word so charged that it is monumentally divisive. After all, the strike centred on the issue of whether the strikers be deemed political prisoners or common criminals. Ultimately, it was about the moral and legal legitimacy of the North itself.
Thus it was political in the extreme. Because of the deaths of Sands and nine other hunger strikers, Sinn Féin grew politically and the IRA waned. Perhaps that's the greatest irony of all because the North's peace process resulted and simultaneously the Republic's Celtic Tiger economy, for which McDowell and his PD party, rightly or wrongly, regularly claim credit, began.
In a sense then, McDowell, like most of the rest of us on this island, can be held to have benefited from the death of Bobby Sands. Politics, after all, are messy and often infuriating but preferable to violence. McLaughlin's republican orthodoxy over Jean McConville has been properly condemned but McDowell's divisive remark about Bobby Sands deserves comparable attention.