WHAT chance peace, on this weekend when multitudes of people throughout Ireland will march to show their abhorrence of violence? Will the date of the Canary Wharf murders be marked as the epiphany of a return to darkness? Some hopes that it may not be so still flicker in the absence of further attacks after the Aldwych bus bombing and in the restraint from all out violence within the North itself. But each day which passes without political progress makes it more likely that the calendar will be marked by other violent dates.
Pray Gold that it may not be. For, if the more fearful analyses are correct, the IRA has resolved upon an even more ruthless campaign in which all entreaties to pity will fall on deaf ears. And who can tell at what point the loyalists, hitherto mercifully restrained, may unleash their retaliation?
There must be no retreat from certainty as to who carries the moral responsibility for this perilous pass. No grievance, no impatience at delay, entitles the IRA to destroy not alone human life, but also the sense of opportunity, the uplifting of hearts or the new openings for economic growth, for jobs, for our young people's futures.
There are some signs that, alter a fortnight of shocked paralysis, the two administrations are defining the outlines of a common approach. But it would be wishful thinking to believe that this will be easy or that it will ipso facto succeed. For all the common ground marked out by successive agreements and declarations, Dublin and London have been in less than full accord in their instincts and in their strategies. Since the beginning of the Hume Adams dialogue, Dublin has sought to bring the extremists in from the edges, towards the moderate ground. London's instincts have been inclined towards consolidation of that centre ground. A closer blending of these strategies is now needed.
A reinstitution of the IRA's ceasefire would constitute the single most important step. But is clear that this will not occur unless the Provisionals can see an assured way through to all party negotiations. Given that the IRA will not unilaterally reintroduce the ceasefire, the two governments must define a course which allows the search for consensus to be advanced by those who have eschewed violence, while creating conditions under which others may join in along the way.
The first and most important element of this approach must surely be the fixing of a date for all party talks with but one precondition that all participants have rejected violence by an unqualified acceptance of the six Mitchell principles.
Second, the Government should accept in general principle the proposal first put up by Mr David Trimble and supported by Mr Major that elections take place in Northern Ireland, leading directly to all party negotiations. But the form and shape of the assembly and the electoral system used in voting, must be such that the unionists' numerical superiority is not simplistically replicated in new structures or procedures.
Third, both governments should agree to implement Mr John Hume's proposal for an all Ireland referendum to end political violence. The Provisionals claim their mandate from the general election of 1918, when the people of Ireland, North and South, voted as one. That any serious attachment to this principle of antique legitimacy should persist into the 1990s will appear unlikely to some. Yet there are grounds for believing that an all a Ireland plebiscite would be viewed by significant figures within the movement as taking away what it describes as its right to make war.
A tripartite strategy embracing these elements or something close to it would have the advantage that, while creating the necessary framework for talks, it should also provide the basis for engaging the mainstream unionists, as Mr Trimble has set it out. At the same time, the referendum result would undermine whatever legitimacy those in the Provisional movement believe they have in continuing the violence.
THAT there are enormous practical difficulties in these concepts is a given. To set down and agree upon the modalities of an elective process will require both skill and compromise. Merely to frame a referendum proposal will not be easy. But an initiative thus constructed might be successful in bringing the Provisionals back to their ceasefire and thence into the process of talks and negotiations.
American support and backing, perhaps as guarantors of this process, may in time, be invaluable. But the initiative now rests with John Bruton and John Major. And identifying initiatives is the easy part. We are not dealing here with a vacuum of ideas, rather with political obstacles. Mr Major, in particular, has to be willing to take risks in persuading the unionists that they must be willing to come to the table on terms which they may not fully relish. Yet, in the continuing political vulnerability of Mr Major's government, there reposes perhaps the greatest single doubt that an agreed political response can be identified and successfully implemented.
The reality is that, if the democratically elected politicians cannot define a pathway forward, the IRA will define its own. This will be blood drenched and the IRA will be joined upon it by their loyalist counterparts. The political path way can be blockaded by any participant who refuses to deal or who does not believe, ultimately, in a negotiated agreement. If there are such, and if they adhere to that stance, then there can be little doubt that we are truly regressing into the darkness to face the nightmare.