WHEN he launched his report on the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons in Belfast yesterday, Senator George Mitchell urged his audience to resist the temptation to judge it on a "point scoring" basis. This was, he said, too serious an issue, literally a matter of life and death, to be assessed in terms of which side had come out ahead.
The report itself is not only written with great clarity but is scrupulously fair minded. It poses serious challenges to both sides to create confidence across the sectarian divide, and suggests practical ways of scaling the wall of mistrust which is the most shaming symbol of the past 25 years of conflict.
Nonetheless, it is almost inevitable that the initial reaction should have been to see the report as coming down in favour of one side.
The three man commission was set up originally to try to resolve an argument between two apparently irreconcilable points of view. The British government argued that Sinn Fein could not become involved in all party talks until the IRA handed in some weapons. Sinn Fein replied that there was no possibility of this happening, a stance with which the Irish Government agreed.
The group praises the efforts of those, in Britain and Ireland, who have worked to make peace possible, and emphasises that progress now depends on the willingness of all parties to relinquish "their vast inventories of historical recrimination."
But when it comes to the matter directly to hand - i.e., the practical problems of getting rid of the guns - it finds in favour of Sinn Fein and the Irish Government. Washington Three is judged to be desirable in theory but quite impossible to achieve in practice.
Not surprisingly, politicians in this State have greeted the report with approval and praised the wisdom of Senator Mitchell and his colleagues. But the international body also challenges, Sinn Fein in a way that could have far reaching implications for the future.
All parties to any future negotiations, including Sinn Fein, will be asked to affirm their "total and absolute commitment" to "agree to abide by the terms of any agreement reached in all party negotiations and to resort to democratic and exclusively peaceful methods in trying to alter any aspect of that outcome with which it may disagree." In other words, Gerry Adams and his colleagues will be asked to accept that the principle of consent should govern the future constitutional status of Northern Ireland.
WHEN one reads this careful and politically sophisticated report in greater detail, it quickly becomes apparent that the issue of when and how to decommission the arms is only a small part of it. Senator Mitchell and his colleagues are much more concerned to try to offer principles on how future negotiations should be conducted.
This is one of the factors, presumably, that account for the positive reaction of a whole group of Conservative MPs who might have been expected to give the report, the thumbs down. It has been somewhat surprising to watch Andrew Hunter and others explain that Washington Three was never really a serious proposition - "not an end in itself" - and can thus be jettisoned without a backward look.
The other factor, of course, is the proposal for some form of elected body in Northern Ireland. Last week, in this space, I explained why Northern nationalists view the idea with such suspicion. They see it as an attempt to shift the whole basis of negotiations about the future of Northern Ireland back to a six county setting, undermining the joint approach of the two governments which was first enshrined in the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985.
But Senator Mitchell and his colleagues offer a typically challenging view of how such a body might help to build trust, and thus strengthen the peace, in Northern Ireland. In Paragraph 56 of their report they write: "Elections held in accordance with democratic principles express and reflect the popular will. If it were broadly acceptable, with an appropriate mandate and within the three strand structure, an elective process could contribute to the building of confidence."
It was always on the cards that if the British government were to swallow the Mitchell group's recommendation that Washington Three should be quietly dropped, there would have to be some quid pro quo to make this very distasteful medicine palatable to the unionists. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that simple rejection of an elected assembly is not an adequate reaction.
The questions that will have to be asked - and answered - are what the stated political objectives of such a body would be, how long it would last, whether it could effectively contribute to building confidence between the conflicting political traditions in the North, how it would operate within the three strand process, whether it would lead on to constitutional talks, and so on.
For some time now reports have been circulating in Belfast that the physical plans for such an elected body are already well advanced. Since the old parliament chamber at Stormont was damaged by fire, the opportunity would be used to locate it in another setting with less negative historical associations. The idea seems to be to model it on the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin, with office facilities for all the parties to make it as user friendly as possible.
SINCE David Trimble first put forward the idea of an elected body as a way around the decommissioning impasse, he and his colleagues in the Ulster Unionist Party have tried to reassure nationalists that this is not a cunning plan to resurrect Stormont. Last week in an important speech in Newtownards, John Taylor addressed this very issue.
He told his audience: "If Northern Ireland ever was a Protestant state for a Protestant people, it certainly is not today. For the leader of a major party to promise the return of Stormont is not to address the issues seriously. It is not something that can be delivered to unionists, and it only serves to revive the worst fears of nationalists." As far as I could tell they received the message - and the direct rebuke to Dr Paisley - with equanimity.
Opinion polls in the North show that there is some support in both communities for an elected body, but so far the unionist leadership has singularly failed to persuade either the SDLP or Sinn Fe in that there are any benefits in the idea. Even now, as yesterday's bitter exchanges between the SDLP leader and Mr John Major in the House of Commons showed, the proposal is viewed with extreme suspicion as a political sop which the Prime Minister is offering to the unionists for the most cynical reasons.
Whatever about John Major - and his record on the peace process has been characterised by some courage - the unionists themselves are entitled to a hearing on the issue. Otherwise we are doomed to return to the dialogue of the deaf from which the Mitchell report was meant to help us escape.