Let me get this straight. We needed imbecilic fools butchering and maiming scores in a single explosion before we finally began to introduce the legal measures to close down the bases of republican terrorism in this island - is that right? Yet we felt able to watch, with our laws unchanged, for decades as organised terrorism killed thousands, in careful, measured instalments - is that also right? Dear, sweet God in Heaven.
So do we not also share in the guilt for Omagh? Did we not, with legal fecklessness and moral inertia, allow the incubus of terrorism to grow into a widely acceptable ethical norm? Did we not fail to create a taboo on violence which should have simply made it impossible for IRA and Sinn Fein to operate in public, selling their vile newspapers and spouting their mendacious propaganda and recruiting on campus among the weak and impressionable young?
British injustice
Instead, we were more obsessed with the victims of British injustice than with the infinitely more numerous victims of Irish paramilitary injustice; so our courts counted angels upon the heads of needles, and if there were only 999 present, those courts would then send the latest accused home to his Semtex and his fuses. We reached the moral and legal nadir, unique within the civilised states of Europe, when it was adjudged to be the law of the land that terrorists could not be extradited if they murdered with handguns in the name of a united Ireland. That is the law, our law, which actually saw two men successfully escape extradition over the head-shot murder of a sergeant in a recruiting office in Derby.
Is it surprising that young people might be a little confused when our Supreme Court can make such dispositions? Is it surprising that the perception grew that there is something not-all-bad about terrorism if such a law produced virtually no condemnation apart from that in this space and, far more authoritatively, from Prof Kevin Boyle, a founder member of People's Democracy in the North (and whose moral and legal eminence on this island we have sorely missed in recent years)?
And is it surprising that, while atrocity followed atrocity, and the State responded merely with the querulous disapproval and weary anger of an elderly schoolmaster trying to control turbulent adolescents, young people might conclude that what had energy, single-mindedness of purpose and moral certainty - the qualities which our terrorist community possessed in abundance - might also be right? Might not the young be impressed by the cultic inflexibility, the burning enthusiasm and the ethical purity of terrorist dementia, in such contrast to the hithering and dithering ambiguities of the State?
No crackdown
The Mountbatten murders brought no crackdown, nor did Enniskillen, and this State wasn't even represented at the funerals of the victims in that town. Tom Oliver of Louth was murdered by the IRA because he allegedly gave information to the Garda Siochana. Dev would have had every republican for 100 miles hoisted from their beds; this time, even local IRA men slumbered untroubled. If Tom Oliver was an informer, he was doing his duty to this State; yet not a single government representative stood at his graveside.
But we showed the power of political will after the murder of Veronica Guerin with our laws against drug-pushers; my, how tough we were then, with a special bureau to investigate and confiscate assets, with seven-day interrogations and extraordinary powers of search, detention and interrogation, which within months resulted in almost the complete destruction of the criminal underworld of Dublin.
We did not so react with the IRA, which was able to thrive like a strange fungus in the numerous interstices between law and political will. The very time to threaten severity was as the peace process gathered momentum: inside a settlement there would be accommodation, reconciliation, and - for those who took oaths of peace - shortened prison sentences; but outside it there would be darkness and the certainty of a ruthless and unrelenting rule of order, beyond interference by barristers, judges or the sly and tendentious pleadings of fellow-travellers wearing the guise of liberty.
The Real IRA came into existence sincerely believing that the old rules would apply. Provided the boys weren't caught on the job and didn't squeal during the three days' interrogation, they'd be safe enough; and if things went wrong, then it's off to the fairly pleasant environs of Portlaoise. They didn't live in terror of the State, or the consequences of our anger; indeed, they felt perfectly free to organise, even in public. Why not? They saw IRA prisoners being released unconditionally, with IRA Semtex still safe in IRA bunkers, from which in due course it might soon leach into their own little bombs.
Political will
The Garda cannot be faulted in this; its members moved with zeal whenever they could, but their powers remained confined by the absence of a truly terrifying central political will. Yet all the authority any State could want so it might impose its will on illegal dissent had been conferred by the referendum last May. That authority was not used. Special measures were not employed against the Real IRA. It wasn't crushed out of existence, as it should have been.
And by any standard, what the Government now proposes is not only too little - four days' interrogation, and not seven, as it is for drug offences - but worse, far worse, it is too late. We should be ill with shame.