HERE WE go again, up the dead end of the high moral ground. After a brief spell of treading carefully, we are back to walking with the certain gait of people who know exactly where they are going. We have about us the air of principle which we assumed to carry us through 25 years of war.
The "principled" approach is to be against violence, to refuse to condone violence, to repudiate violence. At face value these principles are fine sounding. The fact that they do nothing but add a hint of certainty to our step along the road to nowhere is not something which one gets thanked for pointing out.
In the past fortnight, the establishments in London and Dublin have been resuming the positions they held for a generation. The "windows of opportunity" have been closing one by one, the curtains pulled and the lights turned off. The answering machines are switched on and the same old high moral tones echo again throughout the land. No talks without this. No talks without that. We cannot yield to this or that or the other.
A simple question: do we want peace or do we want war? Let us be in no doubt that a resumption of war is now possible. The IRA statement of last week can have left little doubt about that. And yet it is also possible that, with a little right thinking, the fragile peace could be saved.
There are a number of interesting aspects of the culture of condemnation which has grown up in response to the violence of the past 25 years. In the first place it is noticeable that virtually nobody condemns violence in a universal manner. Everyone condemns violence in accordance with a specific political outlook. They condemn the IRA and/or the loyalist paramilitaries, or they condemn the RUC and British army. In the second place, it never seems to matter to the repudiators that their condemnations are absolutely of no practical use.
But the most interesting thing about this culture of condemnation is the way in which it can short circuit public thinking and send common sense up in smoke. Thus, in the past week it has been said that a return to the conflict is better than allowing Sinn Fein into talks in advance of a resumption of the IRA ceasefire. Can anyone in their right mind seriously suggest that a return toe conflict in any circumstances is preferable to anything?
Only the covering fire of humbug from the dead end of the high moral ground enables such off the wall logic to be advanced. Because repudiation of violence - however selectively and pointlessly - has been established as a "principle", it is possible to use it as a shield behind which to stand common sense and moral perspective on their heads.
We either accept there is a problem in the North or we refuse to accept it. If we refuse to accept it, then let us go back to the ostrich posture of the past quarter century. If we accept it, we must accept, too, that violence is an element of the problem. Whether we condone it or not, violence and war are inseparable bedfellows. We can continue to make ourselves feel good while the war goes on, or we can resolve to try and do something about it.
If we have been guided by the rhetoric, we may have come to believe that the present impasse has something to do with principles. This "principled" analysis goes something like this: Sinn Fein is being excluded from talks because the IRA has refused to restore the ceasefire. Therefore the exclusion is an assertion of the principle of opposition to violence.
This is bogus. The true obstacle is the refusal of the unionist leadership to enter into discussions in good faith, and the failure of either the British or Irish governments to call them to account. The issue of violence, and the attendant culture of repudiation, simply add a veneer of principle to a hard core of cynicism. It might well be argued that, by persisting with its commitment to physical force, the IRA is playing into the hands of its opponents, but this line of thinking gets us nowhere as well.
The fog of condemnation serves to obscure the reality that if we are to see an end to violence, the rhetoricians claim to want, we have to engage with the forces responsible for continuing that violence. The point of peace talks is to engage with those who make war.
THOSE who have, according to the rhetoric of condemnation, been most responsible for the violence of the past quarter century have shown a willingness to shift from war to politics. They have made clear that they are doing so with a view to achieving a negotiated settlement. In other words, as far as we can tell, if talks are pursued in good faith, both republican and loyalist paramilitaries will accept the outcome.
Therefore, it would seem clear that the "men of violence" are working towards removing violence permanently from the equation. The real inertia, however, is centred on those who have spent 25 years hiding behind the "men of violence" - on the one hand mouthing platitudes of condemnation, while on the other exploiting the background radiation of violence to maintain their own positions.
What is doubly infuriating is that the refusal to confront their hypocrisy and force them to face the hard centre of this conflict is utterly unproductive in terms of achieving peace. The people who have made war no longer want war, but those who have prospered from war from a distance are prepared to countenance its resumption. And fear of their thunder is rendering us all paralysed.
In truth, they have little real power or influence. Like a rotten tree trunk, they will collapse before the slightest touch. The worst they can do is vote John Major out of power. Are we risking a return to war to preserve the worst British government in the awful history of British governments?
These are the realities which, I believe, Albert Reynolds was attempting to address when he said last week that Sinn Fein should be allowed to participate in all party talks in advance of a renewal of the ceasefire. Mr Reynolds, of course, was immediately drowned in a flood of scorn and condescension from the high moral ground. His comments were eminently sensible.
It should be remembered that Mr Reynolds was one of the chief architects of the present de facto peace. If it had been left to those who now dismiss him, the war would still be at full throttle.
Such logic will always be dismissed as morally suspect by those who cloak themselves in principle. But we are faced with a deadly paradox: the option which sounds the most "moral" and "principled" may be the least so. By blandly claiming to oppose violence while doing nothing to end it, we guarantee its continuance into a new generation.
By acknowledging that violence is a reality of war, we might just have a chance of bringing it to an end. Faced with a choice between peace and another 25 years of the smug culture of condemnation, can we really he serious in saying that the latter is preferable?