With three days to the resumption of talks on the decommissioning impasse, there are no clear signals as to how progress - if any - may be made towards the establishment of the new executive. Mr Gerry Adams spoke in Washington last month of "stretching the Republican constituency'. But Easter speeches from Sinn Fein and IRA figures, and other comments since, have reflected little of that sentiment. If there is any faintly hopeful sign it must be the absence from the IRA's Easter statement of any reiteration of its previous insistence that there will be no decommissioning ever, in any circumstances.
Mr Adams and his senior colleagues have striven greatly and have achieved much in seeking to bring their followers along the path to democratic politics. And they are due no small degree of credit for that. But they are entitled to little leeway in their emerging antipathy to the Taoiseach, the Government and others whom they accuse of placing the so-called pan-nationalist consensus in jeopardy by supporting "unionist demands" for decommissioning.
The two governments have failed to comprehend the psychology of the Republican movement, it has been claimed. But this is surely to see the world through the wrong end of the telescope. The Taoiseach, the President of the United States, the British Prime Minister, and others, have contorted themselves to come to terms with the Sinn Fein/IRA mindset. Once-fixed positions have been abandoned. Language has been stretched to the limits of its elasticity. Every possible benefit of every doubt has been extended in seeking to facilitate Sinn Fein's full participation in the political process. But there is a ne plus ultra beyond which it is not possible to go. And it is the Republicans' inability to recognise this which constitutes the real failure of comprehension.
There can be no admittance to the privileges of democratically elected office to those with a permanent paramilitary wing outside the doors. A failure to grasp this reality is a failure to understand the history of modern Ireland and the evolution of this State, in particular. Bertie Ahern cannot concede on it; nor could any other Taoiseach. The insistence on decommissioning is not, as Sinn Fein would have it, merely a unionist demand. It represents the final, irreducible, line which cannot be yielded by any fully-committed democrat. Prisoners can be freed. Demilitarising measures can be put in place. The police and the criminal justice system can be overhauled. But there is no formula by which Republicans can have a partial participation in democracy along with a continuing commitment to paramilitarism. If their leadership ever believed otherwise, it has operated on a naive, flawed, analysis. There are many ways forward if the Republican movement chooses to take any of them. Nobody is seeking the surrender or the humiliation of the IRA. Both governments recognise that reciprocity and proportionality are necessary in reducing both the IRA's capacity for war and the deployment of the security forces. There will be a welcome - and a heartfelt one - if Sinn Fein moves fully into the democratic mainstream. But it is now up to republicanism to move towards that mainstream. Democracy is a prize which has been too hard-won in this State to be diluted as an accommodation for those who want to retain both a political and a paramilitary option. It is not the IRA and Sinn Fein which now need a demonstration of faith from others. It is the so-called Republican family which needs to show that it has turned its back on violence. If it cannot do so, the consequences be what they may, there will be no executive at this time and a permanent settlement will be a future hope rather than an immediate reality.