It would be regrettable if the key point which was made clear in the Taoiseach's interview with the Sunday Times were to be lost in a semantic argument about his obiter dicta. As the journalist who conducted the interview, Liam Clarke, puts it: "only one interpretation is possible and that is that Sinn Fein should not be admitted to an executive until a start had been made on decommissioning. The rest is detail, not ambiguity".
Why should there be any surprise that Mr Ahern has said what he did? He made it plain in November that he believed Sinn Fein had more room to manoeuvre than Mr David Trimble. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the Taoiseach and the relevant ministers fought to secure Sinn Fein's two seats in the executive and to get agreement on the structure and numbers of new departments and cross-Border bodies. Once these objectives had been attained, Mr Ahern declared, he believed that Sinn Fein was in a position to go to the IRA for a start on decommissioning. What did he get for his pains? Another hardline declaration - the third - that there was no question of it. There would not even be a timetable to start the process.
Mr Ahern's advisers moved swiftly on Sunday in time-honoured political fashion to lay a smokescreen over the interview. Sinn Fein followed, with Mr Martin McGuinness declaring he had assurances from the Taoiseach that Mr Ahern had not meant what the Sun- day Times says he meant. Mr McGuinness, it will be recalled, has already put into the mouth of General John de Chastelain words which the general himself declines to articulate publicly. But the Taoiseach's language is plain enough. And the logic which brings him to the position he has expressed is hardly refutable. Prisoners have been released, the Patten commission is at work, army bases are being demilitarised and scaled down - all without any timescale being specified in the Belfast Agreement. Everyone is giving ground, except Sinn Fein and the IRA. As the Taoiseach told his interviewer, "You can't prioritise and bring forward and incrementally do everything and then say we won't even start on the first 0.001 per cent of this issue".
Whether the Taoiseach was politically wise to make this demarche at this time will be a matter of debate. It may have switched public concentration, however temporarily, from the Dublin Castle tribunals. It may even have served to take some of the publicity focus off the Fine Gael Ardfheis at the weekend. But what Mr Ahern has said, as the leader of this State and as the chief spokesman for the constitutional nationalist tradition, sends a clear message to Sinn Fein and the IRA. Yes, the overwhelming majority of people on this island want you to have your share of political power. Yes, they want you to participate in the new structures now about to be brought into existence under the Belfast Agreement. But no, they are not prepared to accord you the full privileges of democratic participation while you maintain a private army and indicate no willingness to divest it of its killing-power, now or at any time in the future.
It may be that the March deadline for the transfer of powers from Westminster to the new institutions will not be met. But if so it will not be because of anything Mr Ahern has said at this point. David Trimble's unionists may well be content to slow the pace of change and may count as a victory each day that Sinn Fein is kept from office. But Sinn Fein's exclusion is not of David Trimble's making either. Securing Sinn Fein's participation in the executive rests within nobody's hands but its own - and those of its affiliates in the IRA.