Decommissioning was never going to happen, and this was clear from the start. After two years of playing ducks and drakes with the peace process, the penny has finally dropped with the Government of this Republic, which now seeks a settlement formula centred on the IRA's eventual disbandment. This will not work either, because it just couches the same set of requirements in a less immediate set of conditions.
Indeed, it represents an escalation of the unionist demand. The proposal is pointless, as the IRA would have had to disband anyway once the conflict came to an end. Any insistence on demobilisation will delay this natural process.
Why would anyone believe the IRA would demobilise any more readily than it would decommission? Surely the principle of disarmament, not the date of delivery, is the problem, and the same principles apply to disbandment? Moreover, why would the Ulster Unionist Party agree to accept such a proposal when it is doing fine with its existing demands? Even if unionists played ball, this formula would make no difference, since it offers the same capacity for semantics and prevarication that caused the decommissioning issue to stymie the process until now.
It all goes to show how intent we are on missing the point. Our determination to do so is not explainable within the parameters of the mutual irreconcilability between the republican and unionist positions, but is indicative of a deeper problem, mainly concerning "down here".
Decommissioning was largely pursued to discomfit republicans, to deny them equal participation in the process and to re-establish certain assumptions which had been temporarily, but necessarily, unseated by the Belfast Agreement. But at a deeper level there was something else at work. This was especially visible in the shifting response in the Republic since Good Friday 1998, which went from initial euphoria and an almost maudlin desire to embrace all sides back to the hardline positions which trapped us for 25 years.
The true picture is hinted at by the fact that nobody appears too concerned about decommissioning by loyalist paramilitaries. The standard explanation, that loyalist violence was "reactive", is nonsense. It isn't surprising that unionists should adopt these positions, or that the British government should seek to support them.
But what is surprising is that anyone in nationalist Ireland could continue buttressing an analytical paradigm which the agreement had been constructed to dismantle. Listening to TDs
and reading editorials in this and other newspapers, you might think the Belfast Agreement had represented no change at all in attitudes to the meaning of the conflict, or that it was a pretence to trick republicans into handing over guns.
The reason for the continuing apologias for unionist intransigence from "down here" is not reasoned opposition to the agreement, or suspicion of the Sinn Fein leadership, but the continuing desire to demonstrate to the world that we, in this Republic, do not approve of violence allegedly carried out in our name.
It is an expression of guilt, but also, paradoxically, an insistence that we have played no part in the griefs of the North. This is interesting because of the related syndrome besetting unionists who desire to show they bear no responsibility for anything.
The semantic games, then, are played to conceal the truth of our common objectives. We should be conscious of this from the similarities of the rhetoric emanating from ostensibly opposing quarters - the ritual condemnations, the repeated impossible demands. Whether these appear in a David Trimble script or a Dublin editorial, they articulate the same implicit refrain: we are clean, we are clean, we are all clean.
The two syndromes are also mutually self-perpetuating. In their efforts to backtrack on the Belfast Agreement, unionists gained enormous moral encouragement from the renewed repetition of old mantras in the South, and felt vindicated by the fact that most of the public voices here have supported their stances and version of history. The inference is that, if "moderate Southern nationalism" believes them right, they must be.
But this does not follow. It is precisely because "moderate" opinion in the Republic supports the unionist position that we must be suspicious. Moderate southern nationalism's need to wash its hands, to show the world it has moved beyond all these incomprehensible tribal hatreds, is itself part of the problem.
Nobody has clean hands. For three decades, mainstream unionism stood back mouthing anti-violence platitudes, secure in the knowledge that the British army, the RUC and the loyalist paramilitaries were doing its dirty work. We in the Republic, whether we take one side, the other or neither, are no more clean than anyone else.
The irony is that those in the South who ran away from republicanism because of IRA atrocities did not run into no man's land: they ran into the embrace of the terrible twin of republican violence; but then went that step too far by seeking, as a means of validating this guiltdriven response, to "understand" unionist hatreds and explain them away. This is why Southern politicians and leader writers are silent about loyalist weapons: to ask for them would be to undermine their own penitence.
Thus, a largely unremarked element of the mechanism which collapsed the executive was the Pontius Pilate response of Southern nationalism, which desired, even more than it desired peace, to declare itself "not guilty".
Without encouragement from "down here", neither the unionists nor the British government could possibly have succeeded in denying the seismic nature of the Belfast Agreement, which in effect they have done. When you factor in the various desires for exculpation, and the extent to which Southern attitudes are an important contributor to the internal mix and external perceptions of the conflict, it is clear that the voice of Southern nationalism has been a central element in the creation of the present impasse.
Because we are unwilling to place our own desire for exoneration to one side, we risk pushing the North back towards the abyss.
jwaters@irish-times.ie