CAUGHT between the stupid inhumanity of the IRA and the seemingly congenital folly of its opponents, it is difficult to say what needs to be said and heard. The easy option is to reach for the lexicon of repudiation and join the chorus of condemnation.
But someone has to say the obvious. After Adare, after Manchester, I repeat: condemnation makes us sound better and feel better but does nothing to create conditions in which further deaths or injuries might be avoided. What might save us from future Adares and Manchesters is a little verbal restraint and common sense.
There have been few of these commodities on display in the past week. The Government's challenge to Sinn Fein, trumpeted and celebrated as an important stand, was the height of stupidity. We are, it appears, supposed to keel over in wonder at the Government's audacity in asking Sinn Fein if (a) it has yet gone to the IRA to ask for a ceasefire, and (b) whether the party continues to support the armed struggle of the IRA.
In the first place, does it matter whether Sinn Fein has gone to the IRA to ask for a ceasefire? One presumes that members of the IRA army council read the newspapers and so will already be aware that almost everybody would like them to stop killing people.
As to whether Sinn Fein supports the armed struggle - does this matter more than the fact that Sinn Fein represents our best chance of ending the conflict? Surely any child in the street could inform the Government that Sinn Fein has, under the enlightened and courageous leadership of Gerry Adams, long sought a peaceful resolution of the conflict and arguing within the republican movement for the pursuit of a purely political strategy.
Of course, the Government's purpose in asking such questions is not to obtain information. Still less have such ploys to do with restoring the peace. The Government is engaged in an exercise in "perception manipulation" in an effort to wrongfoot Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein in the eyes of a willing media and a supposedly gullible public.
One concludes inexorably that, their vision impaired by the moral fog of ritual condemnation, many of our political leaders cannot see that the consequences of their words and actions are likely to be the direct opposite of their stated intentions. We are confronted with two possibilities: one, that they are fools, the other that they wilfully adopt absolute positions because they lack the courage to proceed with the peace process.
SUPPOSE that at lunchtime today, Gerry Adams were to go on RTE's News at One and announce that he and his leading Sinn Fein colleagues were renouncing the IRA.
What would be the consequences?
Undoubtedly, Mr Bruton would immediately issue a statement welcoming Mr Adams aboard the democratic process. Other party leaders might, with varying degrees of churlishness, do likewise. Commentators would engage in an orgy of triumphalist sanctimony. No doubt many of us would feel proud to have participated in this historic moment.
What then?
It seems obvious to me that then the IRA, in turn, would renounce Gerry Adams. The republican movement would be split yet again. But the genie of physical force republicanism would be at least as elusively at large as at any time in the past. The IRA campaign, the brake of moderate republicanism removed from it, would proceed with a new ferocity.
The best it would become would be like the worst it was before. The net result would be a repetition of 1970 and the creation of new generations of Stickies and irredentist physical force republicans.
Sometimes it seems that this is all most political leaders in the Republic are prepared to imagine. They say they want peace but their words and actions suggest otherwise.
They ask Gerry Adam's to repudiate the Manchester bombing and when he does they demand that he go what they insist is a step further and "condemn" it. It is reminiscent of the contributions of many of the same people in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 cessation, when they harped endlessly on the difference between "permanent" and "complete".
What is this nonsense about? Does it matter if Gerry Adams condemns or does not condemn? What is the difference between "repudiate" and, "condemn"? Will the untellable numbers of potential future victims of this conflict gain a single crumb of comfort from such semantics?
Or could it be that, like the British government, the Irish Government and most of our political and media establishment simply want from republicans a gesture of surrender? Could it be that they have so come to believe the untruths they have told themselves about their own political and military lineage that they want from Sinn Fein a similar declaration of dishonesty?
Could it be that they are so deeply wedded to the notion of vindicating and validating the nature of the southern State, and the spurious version of history on which it is based, that they are more interested in empty declarations from Gerry Adams than they are in the fact that this leader of Sinn Fein represents the one chance of ending this conflict that any of us alive on this island today will see in our lifetimes?
COULD it possibly be as simple as this: that the establishment in this republic is more interested in defeating republicism than in peace? Perhaps this, for them, is the real end of the line: Gerry Adams on Questions and Answers saying "I was wrong".
That, I believe, may well be the limit of their ambition. For why else would they spend more energy in attempting to browbeat Mr Adams into seeing things from their viewpoint than in seeking - by working to remove the obstacles to full engagement between all of the participants in this conflict - to demonstrate to republicans that Gerry Adams is right when he tells them - as he does - that armed struggle is counter productive?
Gerry Adams stands head, shoulders, chest and torso above the political midgets who denounce and berate him. While they have been content to pay lip service to peace, he has been placing his reputation, even his very life, on the line in his search for a permanent settlement of this savage conflict.
It is time for the games and semantics to stop. We are at one of the most critical moments in our history. If the conflict is allowed to enter a new phase, it may take another generation to untangle. The Taoiseach, speaking in the Dail on Wednesday, vaingloriously repeated his famous public interrogation of Sinn Fein. "No question could be simpler or more fundamental", he said, than whether Sinn Fein supports the armed struggle of the IRA.
There is, in fact, a simpler and more fundamental question, which I asked in this column two weeks ago: do we want peace or do we want war?