If the Northern conflict was a simple matter of criminality there would, perhaps, be no cause for quarrel with what has occurred since last Good Friday. If, for example, the authorities had been dealing with a case of hostage-taking, and the negotiating process had followed similar lines, most people would regard the tactics employed by the Ulster Unionist Party and the British and Irish governments as legitimate responses to uncomplicated lawlessness.
Suppose the hostage-takers, having seized their prisoners, had entered into talks in which their demands for, say, the release of political prisoners had ostensibly been conceded. But, once the villains released their captives, the authorities had reneged, refusing to discuss things further until the kidnappers agreed to give themselves up. Most people, on hearing such news, would smile quietly at the cunning of the authorities and decide that public safety was in good hands.
This is more or less what has happened since last Good Friday. To perceive this, it is necessary to look beyond the events of the past year to the long-standing attitudes and motivation of those who have been the main influences in the drift of such events. It is clear now that certainly the UUP, probably the British government, and possibly also the Irish Government, saw the Belfast Agreement as an opportunity to move Irish republicans beyond a line which they could not re-cross. It is clear also that large sections of the media in both Britain and Ireland - but especially in the Republic - saw things in much the same way.
In other words, hype notwithstanding, there was no "South African moment" but, rather, a cleverly constructed trap to catch republicanism offside. If reality had lived up to the rhetoric, we would by now have crossed into a new reality, in which past enemies would have put their differences behind them and set about building a peaceful future on the foundations of the resulting trust.
But for this to occur it would have been necessary for those involved to share responsibility, to accept that the conflict had involved wrongdoing on all sides - including that of alleged authority.
THIS fundamental element was missing from the mix. At no time has the British government offered more than the most mealy-mouthed acknowledgment of even the more appalling excesses of British involvement in Ireland. At no time has David Trimble made even a token acknowledgment of the history of sectarianism and uncivilised behaviour that was unionist rule.
At all times, the view of virtually everyone outside the republican enclaves was that the central problem in the conflict was the IRA, an analysis fully supported by the Southern media. The only breakthrough in 30 years occurred when one man, John Hume, reached across the constitutional border, implicitly querying this view.
And what is perhaps most worrying about the present moment is that the Irish Government, under Bertie Ahern, appears to have regressed to a pre-Albert Reynolds analysis of the problem, implicitly accepting the British and unionist view that the primary problem is the IRA and its weaponry.
So, whereas republicans and large numbers of the electorates North and South entered into the spirit of Good Friday 1998 in the belief that at last there was some minimal acknowledgment of the true nature of the conflict, it is clear that most of those with real influence entered the exercise in a different frame of mind.
It is becoming clear also that, although the general public euphoria of last April was genuinely to do with a belief that a South African moment had been achieved, the satisfaction of the two governments and the Ulster Unionists was to do with a belief that republicans had finally been persuaded into the parlour, to be neutralised.
There were many clues to this reality had we chosen to observe them. For example, the censorious response to the appearance of the Balcombe Street Four and other IRA prisoners at the Sinn Fein Ardfheis last May might have told us that few outside republican circles accepted that a new consciousness was necessary, let alone that it had been achieved. The thrust of the response was that it was unseemly for convicted criminals to be feted in such a "triumphalist" manner at a political gathering.
But if we really believed in what we had been told had occurred in Belfast on Good Friday, we should at least have been able to extend to republicanism the right to perceive the conflict according to its own lights and perspectives and take the same satisfaction in its achievement as its opponents. We had the right to be displeased at what might have been considered indifference to the sensitivities of IRA victims, but we no longer had the right to say that these men and women were simple criminals, because two sovereign governments and all those who had put their names to the agreement had conceded that they were not.
The very existence of the agreement therefore implies that this conflict was never a simple issue of criminality. And just over a week ago, with the murder of Rosemary Nelson, we had a tragic but timely reminder of this reality. The attitude of authorities and opinion-formers North and South has never been confined to condemning the IRA, but is rather founded on the belief that, really, nationalists do not have the kind of grievance against the Northern state that could not have been dealt with by constitutional means.
In 30 years of episodes similar to the Nelson murder, those in authority have shown little capacity to see such events - when they condescended to see them at all - as other than minor aberrations, thus conspiring to avoid the most central reality: that Northern Ireland is a quasifascist statelet policed by a standing army loyal to one community.
WHY do we call it a "peace process" if we are not prepared to admit that there has been a war? If there has not been a war, why are prisoners being released? Why is the RUC under review? And if there has been a war, why do those in authority have such difficulty in carrying the logic of conflict-resolution to its necessary conclusion? These, rather than the continuing, dangerous nonsense about decommissioning, are the questions that should be focused on right now.
The decommissioning issue itself is emblematic of the broader difficulty, because to call for a handing in of IRA weapons without acknowledging that this is just one element in a bigger picture implies that republicans are especially lawless and particularly untrustworthy and, therefore, unworthy of association with a solemn peace agreement on their word alone. Until the present attitudes of those in authority changes, there is no hope of a true breakthrough.