Is Bertie Ahern whistling in the dark when he seeks to dismiss police claims that the IRA is still up to its neck in organised crime?
Both Blair and Ahern are playing the same game: they are talking up the imminent report of the International Monitoring Commission, the official but independent watchdog on terrorists, hinting that it will give the Provisionals a clean bill of health.
Armed with that, urge the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach, would not Sinn Féin/IRA be entitled to be regarded as squeaky clean and ready for office?
Two points here. The first is that I am authoritatively advised that the IMC will not give the IRA a clean bill of health. Progress will be credited; but that will be accompanied by a warning that the task of converting to exclusively lawful, democratic and peaceful means is not yet complete.
Official spin seeks to muddy the water by suggesting that endemic crime on the border is the work of republican fringe elements, acting in defiance of the top direction. If so, then this fringe possesses formidable resources in finance, personnel and organised distribution.
What about the 45 tons of highly toxic sludge found in a stolen container on the Armagh-Monaghan border last week? Chemists estimate that it represented the leavings from the illegal washing of three million litres of smuggled diesel. This is not the sort of sideline run by a fellow with five pigs and two cows.
Police and garda appear to have no doubts about the reality of the continuing lawlessness on both sides of the border. Hence their increasingly tetchy exchanges with ministers.
For Blair and Ahern, the key problem can be bluntly put: it is that the fine print of which republicans are doing it may not matter to the unionists. Paisley's logic is that he wants no part of them in government until the gangsterism stops.
Many are convinced that Paisley will never go into Government with Sinn Féin. They may be right. His leading lieutenants now have jobs and expense accounts, thanks to the party's successes at the last election. So he knows their hunger for office at Stormont is allayed. He can afford to be fundamentalist on the republicans.
According to the holy writ of the Agreement, all parties accept the present constitutional position of Northern Ireland as a basis for government. But "The unionist community as a whole," (I quote from a long and thoughtful letter I received some time ago from a Catholic priest, a Benedictine, in the north of England) "has huge doubts about the sincerity of republican acceptance of the legal status quo and (my italics) their commitment to making Northern Ireland work—and I share those doubts."
The parallel with the Middle East is depressing. There, Hamas, the armed Islamic movement, has been on cease-fire for a year. But suicide bombings continue, weapons are being stockpiled and it has polled well in this week's elections. Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli Prime Minister, declared on Wednesday that he would negotiate "with anyone who abandons the goal of destroying Israel".
I fail to see how stable Stormont government can be constructed involving parties deeply divided on the very existence of the state itself. This, of course, touches upon one of the most foolish clauses in the Agreement—which implies that the constitutional position could automatically change were a referendum upon it to produce a majority of one in favour.
It breeds instability—and distrust. Ah, trust! The missing element, without which nothing—above all power-sharing—is possible.
Unionists have clearly lost trust in the Government and the Irish Government. They suspect that Blair, supported by Ahern, has negotiated a secret deal with republicans on law enforcement. It is called "Restorative Justice"; and the body that would be involved has a deputy project director who served a sentence for the murder at the funeral of the two Army corporals at Casement Park.
The official purpose is to draw republicans into policing; but republicans regard the groups as alternatives to the PSNI and would use them as a means of bypassing the police, putting law enforcement in crime-infested border areas largely into the hands of ex-IRA members—at the taxpayers' expense. The disquieting aspect of the initiative is the secrecy: the Government has refused to show the first draft of its scheme either to the Policing Board or to the political parties.
So suspicion thrives and next month's party talks may have more form than substance.
