The current Sinn Féin refrain to the effect that they are being pursued opportunistically by political opponents in the Republic may have some merit, but it is not an argument that can be recommended to them at this time.
Although it is true that most of the heat is being generated by longtime critics of "Sinn Féin/IRA", this will not let Sinn Féin off the hook. The onus is on republicans to address the problem that everyone knows to exist. That problem increasingly centres on the right of these self-proclaimed republicans to continue claiming the badge of freedom fighters on behalf of the Irish nation. Unless they do this, whatever short-term gains may now be made by their opponents will be nothing to the damage they will inflict on themselves and the fabric of Irish nationalism.
Arising out of the recent controversies is a proposition that has yet to be articulated: that the present incarnation of republicanism, based in the North and mired in a parochial view of the northern situation, has grown into a deeply partitionist movement which has no empathy with nationalism south of the Border.
The evidence in support of this apparently self-contradictory idea is fragmentary and dispersed, but rapidly forming a new pattern: not just in the McCartney murder and its squalid aftermath; not just in the bank robbery and the money laundering; not just in the murder of a Garda officer in cold blood; but in the demeanour of republicans as they seek to justify everything in tones of aggrieved self-righteousness.
Northern republicans see themselves facing again the old enemies: unionism, the Brits, the west-Brits, the quisling Free State government, the revisionists and those who fear the onward march of Irish republicanism. These, in truth, are the least of their difficulties. In the North, Sinn Féin has run into an Animal Farm moment as a result of the McCartney murder. There is a growing sense that nationalist communities have started to look upon their erstwhile defenders much as they once looked on those whom the IRA existed to oppose.
But, here in the Republic, the crisis facing republicans is of an altogether different order.
The present generation of republicans seems oblivious to the idea that the tradition of Irish nationalism belongs at least as much to the people of the Republic as to nationalists in the North. Although northern nationalists have more recently been involved in fighting (allegedly) on behalf of this tradition, they did so with the aspiration to a united Ireland on their lips.
And whether northern nationalists realise it or not, their southern counterparts have never been able to imagine any way in which unity could be achieved other than by extending northwards the embrace of this Republic.
Northern "republicans" appear to believe that, having struggled most recently on behalf of the national aspiration, they - and only they - have the moral right to decide how that aspiration should be proceeded with. The fatuous abstraction of a "32-county socialist republic", which republicans peddle as an alternative to a proper intellectual engagement with the conundrum of notional national unity, has no meaning south of the Border.
But in the Republic, strangely, the idea of unity remains a practical philosophical proposition. With recent generations, many of us may have let go of the belief that it should be furthered by guns and bombs, but we held nonetheless to our right to the dream. Some of us offered support to the Provisionals because they carried the flags we honoured, because they had the bones of a just cause, and because we wanted to persuade them that there were better ways of proceeding than slaughter and destruction.
The Provos, however, seeming to believe themselves the sole franchise-holders on Irish self-realisation, began to take southern nationalism for granted. The first signs surfaced in 1998 in the attitude of northern republicans to Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution. They appeared to have no concept of the meaning of the aspirations expressed therein and were willing to barter them casually for whatever They could gain in return.
We were prepared to let go of them too, but only because we imagined that their sacrifice might result in the peace we craved.
The possibility now that a partly-representative element of northern nationalism was prepared to urge us to abandon these aspirations so that they could gain bargaining power with their opponents, expand their power base, fill their illicit coffers and prepare the way for a semi-constitutional assault on the democracy of this Republic - and in doing so play ducks-and-drakes with the peace and bring further discredit on those who had sought to support them - is so cataclysmic for the future cohesion of Irish nationalism that what we need from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness is not more blather about the gamesmanship of their opponents, but a clear statement of what northern republicans think they are about.