ONE of the things that makes it so hard to talk about the peace process in the wake of the treacherous IRA murders last week of Inan Bashir and John Jeffries is that we have spent a year and a half biting our tongues. The last 18 months have been marked not just by a suspension of violence but also by a suspension of disbelief. It has been a time for not saying things clearly, for avoiding issues in the hope that, when the time came to face them, they would not be so difficult as they seemed.
The peace process so far has been based on the cultivation of ambiguities, the stretching of language so that it seems to cover irreconcilable differences without actually finding a way around them. Its courageous founding act, the HumeAdams dialogue and those elements of it reflected in the Downing Street Declaration, depended on a gap between rhetoric and reality. A rhetoric of nationalist victory - "the democratic right of self determination by the people of Ireland as a whole" - was used to cover a grudging acceptance of the reality of the so called unionist veto - "subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland". It was a brilliant face saver for the IRA, seeming at one and the same time to expose the futility of its long war and yet to allow it to claim that the goal of that war had been achieved.
It was a benevolent, and perhaps necessary, lie. And it was given substance in another useful lie, the so called pan nationalist front. To secure the IRA ceasefire, it was necessary to construct the appearance of an alliance that does not really exist. The payoff for the ceasefire was to be that the Irish Government and opposition parties, the SDLP, the Irish American lobby and sympathisers within and around the Clinton administration would join with Sinn Fein to provide a democratic alternative to the IRA's violence as a way of securing nationalist demands.
Again, this was a benevolent strategy, and it seemed to work. But again, it depended on everyone agreeing to go along with a useful fiction. There is no pan nationalist front. One of the things that became entirely clear after the ceasefires is that the issue of violence is not a mere matter of tactics.
The rest of us in supposedly nationalist Ireland were not distinguished from the IRA and Sinn Fein merely by the fact that we agreed with the Provo's aims but not their methods. The issue of consent is not an issue of tactics but an absolutely fundamental political principle, founded deep in an understanding of history and contemporary reality.
SINN Fein's inability to agree to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation's idea of consent merely brought to the surface this hidden fault line beneath the idea of a pan nationalist front. To the extent that there is a nationalist consensus, Sinn Fein and the IRA have been outside it all through the peace process.
While the IRA ceasefire held, it seemed wrong to make too much of these ambiguities and evasions. Their enabling effect seemed to outweigh their fundamental dishonesty. But they had negative and dangerous effects as well. One was that the myth of a pan nationalist front, though it helped to soothe the IRA, encouraged fear and suspicion on the part of unionists.
It does not in any way excuse the petulance and intransigence of, for instance, David Trimble's refusal even to take a phone call from Dick Spring. But neither should people in the Republic forget how much the illusion of a sophisticated nationalist alliance, stretching from crafty diplomats to men with baseball bats, replayed the darkest nightmares of Northern Protestants.
And perhaps even more importantly, the evasions have had a bad effect on Sinn Fein itself. Sinn Fein was allowed to contradict itself in the interests of peace. On the one hand, we could hear, for instance, Mitchel McLaughlin talking about "the exercise, by agreement and by consent, of self determination". On the other, we could listen to Martin McGuinness denouncing the "unionist veto" which is merely a pejorative term for the need to secure consent.
This messing with language seemed tolerable as an exercise in tactical ambiguity, a way of keeping the hard men on board. But did it not also stifle the process of real political development within Sinn Fein itself? Did it not indeed encourage the more deadly self contradiction of the IRA, that of murdering and maiming in order to secure political dialogue?
The idea that killing innocent people is a good way to get to a negotiating table at which you will seek agreement and consent is a cruel absurdity, but an absurdity rooted in the easy slippage between "consent" and "veto" in Sinn Fein statements.
Another consequence of holding our tongues has been the creation of a political and intellectual vacuum. Hidden within the benign and well meant idea that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" has been an encouragement to hold off any action or even debate until the real bargaining starts. Not wanting either to offend any side or to declare hands before the playing starts, everything has been placed in the pending tray.
Things which could and should be done unilaterally and for their own sake have been postponed until the great day of all party talks arrives. "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" has become, in effect, "nothing happens until everything is agreed".
Everyone knows, for instance, that the Irish Constitution has to change to incorporate the principle of consent, and an overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Republic would be happy for this to happen. But in the Downing Street Declaration, such a change is promised only "in the event of an overall settlement".
ALMOST everyone, unionist and nationalist, agrees that a formal bill of rights for Northern Ireland, guaranteeing equality before the law, is a good idea. But it, too, has entered the never realm of eventual negotiations. Almost everyone accepts that the protection of civil liberties and a radical reform of the RUC are necessary. They, too, are in the pending tray. In effect, every change that might contribute to a lasting peace has been postponed, not just by the mismanagement of the British government, but by the shape of the peace process itself.
The IRA has blown away the ambiguities and brought its own fascistic clarity to the situation. In response, the two governments must see the futility of allowing the IRA to set the limits to political debate and action, either by seeking to appease them or by being panicked into a reversion to a doomed attempt to impose a "security" solution.
They must let the wider community into the peace process. And they must start to make articulate, in plain words and intelligent actions, the desires and demands of the vast majority of people of the island for democratic change.