I DON'T know who IRA men and women mix with. I don't know whether they mix with anyone who doesn't belong to their sect. If there are any IRA people in the little village in the west of Ireland where I was when the bomb went off, they must have noticed the heartfelt grief that was the simple and only reaction to the end of the ceasefire.
People stood in the shops and on the street all but speechless. You hardly ever see Irish people with tears in their eyes. You did on Friday night.
These were people who are citizens of the "nation" which is supposed to express the "nationalism" in whose name the attempted mass murder was committed. But IRA nationalism has nothing to do with us.
One of the things the Canary Wharf bomb did - a minor thing amid the whole, but worth pausing to mourn - was that it repartitioned non unionist Ireland. Twenty five years ago there was passionate identification down here with the minority community in Northern Ireland. Fifteen years ago - during the hunger strikes - a deep emotional surge towards our fellow Catholics in the North was still there to be tapped.
There is no point in charting the retreat of people in Southern Ireland from Northern nationalism.
The South has ceased to understand what most Northerners still understand - the context of beliefs and feelings which led the IRA to start killing again. Because there is no context, the themes Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness return to and the vocabulary they use is repugnant to us, as a reply in gibberish to a straight question would be repugnant.
They seem to us to be endlessly evasive because we want them to concentrate on the fact of killing. We want answers from them about our name - the name "Irish" - being used in killing. We ask them what is the justification for killing.
And they try to put the killing question in a whole historical and social and political context and to make us see other things besides the latest atrocity. And we see that as them wriggling off the hook. And they see us as only interested in the one bit of the whole. And we make sense to ourselves. And they make sense to themselves. It is a dialogue of the deaf.
The ordinary person in the South just doesn't see why the IRA feels justified in going on killing. How, then, can there be a future that contains both ex IRA people and us? Don't they ever think about the walls they're building between us?
If ordinary people counted for anything, IRA people would have to wonder why there is such a gap between ordinary people in the South and themselves.
But I suppose we don't matter to them. It seems that people outside their own people have no reality for them. They have no respect for ordinary life. If they cared for the intricate mystery of hundreds of human beings hurrying through a railway station after a day's work, they wouldn't send glass and brick and metal crashing and screaming into their innocent faces.
"Oh, those poor people... Oh, those poor people." That's all anyone had to say around the village on Friday night, and that was before we knew about the bodies in the wreckage. Why would there be any sympathy with the project of murdering English people?
Who do the IRA think we Irish nationalists here in the South sympathise with them, whoever and wherever they are, or the office workers going home from work? But then, they don't care whether we sympathise or not. There's a spacious, easy place, especially inhabited by the young, which is called the international world, and England/Ireland is part of it.
The volunteers" of "Oglaigh na hEireann" pollute that place with their bombs just like the French pollute the South Seas. They damage us all in our mutual respect, our self respect and in all our relations. For nothing.
But the IRA project is a solitary one. What do IRA bombers care for the responses of the living, if they don't care about the random people they injure and kill, or that the families and lovers and friends of their victims are plunged into desperate unhappiness by their actions?
"The suggestion of an assembly in Northern Ireland was the final straw for the rank and file," an IRA supporter told Suzanne Breen. Well, if the only way "the movement" can react to the proposal of elections - admittedly, an insultingly time wasting proposal - is by trying to murder English office workers, then I'm glad the accident of birth kept me out of "the movement."
THE President, Mrs Robinson, says this is not a time for allowing attitudes to harden. And I know that I have to try to understand. Maybe it seemed to the IRA that the huge achievement of a 17 month cease fire had not been sufficiently honoured, and that their helplessness, when unarmed, was rubbed in their faces. But why should the office workers - have to pay for the offence to the IRA's impatience?
"We had to do something," Northern voices say. "We waited and waited, but we got nothing."
But, during the ceasefire, "we" may have got nothing, but the rest of us, the ordinary people, the shoppers and air travellers and bus station users and holidaymakers and sportsmen and hoteliers, people South and North and in Britain, we got something.
We got the sense of powerful forces, like the Clinton administration, and the EU special funds people, moving in to monitor a steady improvement in the quality of life in Northern Ireland. We got a bit of normality. We got hope for the future. We got to move away from fear and shame - and permanent watchfulness.
I was one of the many, many people who wept with joy when the ceasefire was announced.
We weep again now. In between, we weren't weeping. That was a lot to get.
So attitudes harden, now that we have been hijacked by "we". I have hardened into wondering whether there is any way the South could withdraw for a time from "peace making" activities?
Why do we go on seeking responsibility? The Downing Street Declaration. The Framework Document. The Mitchell Report. All down the drain. It is now clear that our representatives have no more access to, or influence over, nationalist paramilitaries than they have over loyalist paramilitaries. And the paramilitaries run the show.
Gerry Adams talks about "the failed policy" of exclusion and marginalisation of Sinn Fein. Quite rightly. But perhaps he could give us a little time to grieve that inclusion turns out to be a failed policy, too.
The stupidity of the unionists and the cowardice of Westminster were certainly the remote causes of Canary Wharf. But it wasn't to that people reacted. "The poor, poor people. Is this going to go on for the rest of our lives?"