It is only common sense that, when constructive peace talks begin in the North, those who sit around the negotiating table should have forsworn violence without any qualification. The current threat hanging over the Portadown loyalist, Mr Billy Wright, and a second man, Mr Alex Kerr, by former paramilitary colleagues raises serious questions about the loyalist ceasefire which it blatantly violates. The bomb attack on Sunday night on Mr Kerr's parents is an even grimmer indication of the growing rift within the paramilitary organisations and its possible consequences.
So far, there is no evidence that the bomb was ordered by the Combined Loyalist Military Command, but it clearly came from the same culture of violence as the threat to kill Mr Wright and Mr Kerr. Leaders of the mainstream unionist parties have been swift to denounce the two loyalist groups, the PUP and the UDP. And they have demanded their exclusion from the talks on the grounds that they have not unequivocally distanced themselves from the new militancy of the paramilitaries to whom they are linked. Both the Ulster Unionists and the DUP have reason to fear the more flexible political line being put forward by the loyalist parties, and the demand that they should be excluded should not be seen as entirely disinterested.
Any decision on the status of the PUP and the UDP must depend on the outcome of the current power struggle in the paramilitary organisations and whether their ceasefire continues without any violation. But the argument over who should or should not be able to participate in the talks - which will be renewed with equal intensity if the IRA restores its own ceasefire and accepts the Mitchell Principles - ought not to ignore the shifting line between peaceful and violent politics that is a perennial and tragic feature in the North, not least in the last 30 years.
If and when those who have been responsible for the killing make amends and become part of the political process, it will involve a deliberate act of understanding and acceptance by all concerned of the kind underlying the Truth Commission in South Africa. Some of the most prominent of the unionist leaders today including the Rev Ian Paisley, one of the first to denounce the PUP and the UDP - publicly flirted with armed and masked men at a time of grave crisis 20 years ago that could have resulted in civil war. That has, long ceased to place a question mark over Dr Paisley's qualifications to take part in democratic politics. And perhaps rightly so. Buy that dark period in the North's recent history is not irrelevant to the problems that still have to be dispelled.
It is also difficulty to see how the culture of violence on which parliamentarism feeds can be avoided as long as organisations like the Orange Order continue their coat trailing marches through opposing areas. It may be that 90 per cent of marches are peaceful, but the others rouse anger and hostility and perpetually foment the sectarian divide, a fact that even the most innocent and God fearing Orangeman can predict with certainty. The Rev Terence McCaughey, a Presbyterian minister, as reported today, described the order as an instrument to foment hatred and fear" and asked how Protestant clergymen could justify becoming members. His question, asked more than 20 years ago, requires an answer more urgently after this summer's violence.