What would happen if Gerry Adams was to tell us that the IRA has gone away, and all guns were to be handed over to be put out of use? asks Dennis Kennedy
'It's the guns, stupid," would, with apologies to the presidential aide who coined the aphorism about politics and the economy, seem to be the only apt response to the flurry of myopic optimism and confused thinking that has characterised much of the response to the Assembly elections in Northern Ireland.
The Executive collapsed and the Assembly was suspended because the IRA refused to give up its guns. The October Hillsborough accord ended in farce because the IRA refused to give up its guns.
Ian Paisley's DUP came top in the elections because the IRA refused to give up its guns. David Trimble's party came second and his leadership of it is now in doubt because he sat in government with Sinn Féin while the IRA kept its guns (and seemed tempted to do so again.)
The SDLP got a beating because it ignored the guns, kept Sinn Féin in the Executive and then tried to compete with it in the nationalist stakes.
Sinn Féin went to market and brought home the bacon because almost everyone else, including the two governments, was very understanding about the guns and did not make too much of a fuss. The DUP, Donaldson, Burnside et al made a great fuss and creamed off the unionist vote.
So it's the guns, stupid, not the evolution of the DUP, nor the retirement or promotion to glory of the Rev Doctor, nor another election that matters. It's the guns, the same guns that are important enough to rule out any Sinn Féin participation in government in Dublin, but which apparently lose most of their political significance north of Hackball's Cross.
What would happen if, tomorrow, Gerry Adams was to tell us that the IRA has, at last, gone away, if P.O'Neill was to put out his final statement to say that the organisation was disbanded, and all guns, bombs and whatever were to be handed over to that nice Canadian nincompoop? And if, after that, really large quantities of arms were disposed of transparently, and all intimidation and criminal assaults by IRA gangs ceased?
Peace and happiness would not break out overnight, but we might be closer to a seismic shift in the Northern impasse than at any time hitherto.
But, and you can already hear the concerned voices telling you it with regret, it simply can't happen. The IRA will not do it. In other words, because a proscribed subversive organisation refuses to stop committing the serious criminal offence of illegal possession of arms, two governments have to engage in endless contortions and distortions to guarantee a share of power to the associates of the IRA.
Some elected representatives committed to non-violent democratic politics enthusiastically go along with these contortions, others, bribed or browbeaten, do so with great reluctance. Yet does anyone, outside Sinn Féin, believe that the IRA has a right to hold on to a single gun, that it has, or ever had, any right to acquire guns and hold them contrary to the law North and South, and in violation of the Republic's Constitution?
For five and a half years the two governments have kept up the pretence that the IRA has, in principle, given up the gun, and that, given time, may eventually do so in practice. Meanwhile, the rules do not apply to the IRA or to its political associates in Sinn Féin.
Five and a half-years of these charades have left Northern Ireland more bitterly divided than ever, the Belfast Agreement not functioning, devolution suspended and Paisleyism and the political wing of the IRA top of the electoral heap - the precise end most devoutly not desired by the two governments (and by many others) when they embarked on their joint approach to the problem decades ago.
Now fond hopes seem to rest on a limited revision of the Belfast Agreement, some tinkering with the mechanisms in the Assembly governing nationalist-unionist designation and voting rules on the Executive and legislation, and the ministerial pledge of office. As such rules are spelled out in the agreement itself, changing them would amount to a rather fundamental renegotiation. Trying to change them to by-pass the DUP and allow the creation of a UUP-nationalist executive would more likely end in revolution than revision.
Changing them, or even using them, to allow a central coalition of moderate unionists and nationalists to by-pass Sinn Féin could have been a good idea some time ago, but the SDLP would not hear of it, and the governments were not interested. The election makes all this impossible anyway.
Mr Ahern still insists that "inclusivity" is essential. Inclusivity in the present context means the inclusion in government in Northern Ireland of people inextricably linked to terrorism - something which Mr Blair mendaciously promised the people of Northern Ireland would never happen, something which Mr Ahern maintains is unacceptable in, but not to, Dublin.
Neither seems to have got the message. Small wonder then that neither has Sinn Féin, nor a depressingly large minority of the North's electorate. To them all the message is still - it's the guns, stupid.