I was driving along a country road last Sunday when a man flagged me down. He had an Essex accent and a gun, and his seven companions hovering in the background were similarly equipped. When he asked me who I was and where I was going, I told him. I was less than 10 miles from the place where I was reared and he was one Irish Sea and several hundred miles from his hometown, yet he was the one asking the identity and destination questions and I was the one doing the answering.
In the conflict from which we're emerging, there were two main combatants: the IRA and the British army. Commentators on both sides agree that hostilities ended when it became clear that neither side could gain a victory – the IRA could not expel the British, the British army could not destroy the IRA. A military draw. Since the ceasefire was called, one side – the IRA – has decommissioned three substantial caches of weaponry, has promised the destruction of more, and has made it clear that it supports the political path being followed by Sinn Féin. The IRA's conflict counterpart, the British army, has done none of these things: it has not said its war is over, it has not decommissioned and it will definitely not disband. There has been some scaling back of military posts and watchtowers, and if the threat of terrorism is removed, more will follow, it says. Should all sign of political violence subside – say if the IRA and all the loyalist paramilitary factions were to disarm and disband – the British army will trim its presence here to 5,000 troops.
Which raises a very obvious question: why, in peacetime, will we need several thousand heavily armed men in our midst? Well, it depends on who you talk to. Unionist politicians will tell you it's to maintain the peace. To provide security. To be available in an emergency situation.
Put another way: the British army will stay here to deal with anyone who might threaten the link with Britain or British interests. Like all armies, it deals with things by the implicit or explicit threat that if people don't do what it wants, it will shoot them. On occasion, as happened in Derry in 1972, the threat becomes action.
For some people, the military muscle of the British army in this part of Ireland is considered a good thing. Others detest it. But on one thing it's surely time there was agreement: to talk about all sides here pursuing their political goals by exclusively peaceful means is absurd. If you've got 5,000 highly trained, heavily armed people at your back, you're not drawing exclusively on the power of your argument, however weak or strong that argument may be. And yet the chorus of voices calling for proof of commitment to exclusively peaceful means continues to be directed exclusively at just one half of the former combatants, the IRA.
Clearly this involves a lot of self-deception, but it is self-deception that isn't confined to unionism. The murals of west Belfast declare 'Time for Peace – Time to Go'; to which someone should add that line from the Gilbert and Sullivan chorus: "Yes, but you don't go!" British squaddies may be shown trudging towards the horizon while a dove of peace calls 'Slan Abhaile' after them, but the truth is that at least 5,000 gunmen – with light, medium and heavy armaments – will be going nowhere near a bhaile.
And then there's the small matter of 134,000 legally held weapons, almost all in the hands of unionists. No-one mentions these when they're denouncing the IRA's lack of transparency. As for unionists paramilitaries: last weekend a UVF commander said he would be "laughed off the premises" if he suggested decommissioning of any kind.
It used to be said that the Troubles here could no more be ignored than an elephant in your back garden. The amount of arms in this society is not so much elephantine as Himalayan.
Yet unionist and media attention remains focused exclusively on the IRA arms mountain. It's as if all other threatening peaks did not exist or had dissolved into air.
All of the parties going into this election have proclaimed their commitment to exclusively peaceful means.
Let's take them at their word. And then let's see how many of them, over the coming weeks, speak out clearly and unambiguously against unionist paramilitaries, licensed unionist weapons and the thousands of armed foreigners in our midst.
