No doubt about it. The peace process as you've come to know and love it is over. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it has completely changed. Not before time either. Remember, if you count the whole thing starting with Adams approaching Hume in 1987, it's been going for eighteen years, yes. It's near time it was completed and we had a product instead of an eternal process.
Of course the complete change is down to the Northern Bank job. Maybe the change will help to produce a product. At the very least it will clear the air which had been getting a bit foetid as the same people sat in the same positions repeating the same mantras. Some of the people involved had become very comfortable, settled, complacent. Not any more.
Republicans are most aware of the complete sea change and that accounts for the two IRA statements last week, the second one a remarkable sign of weakness following immediately on the failure of the first statement to cut the mustard, but the unprecedented burst of prose from P O'Neill indicates the deep anxiety among republican leaders about the new direction events have taken.
Buried in the heart of the first statement is the source of the anxiety. 'At this time it appears that the two governments are intent on changing the basis of the peace process.' Spot on. They are. No wonder republicans are concerned. They initiated the process in the eighties and have successfully controlled it ever since. The two governments were only delighted to play along hoping, as Bertie Ahern said, to bring Sinn Féin into the centre.
Fundamental to the process was the republican argument that bringing the Irish government, the SDLP and the US government onto the same side would put enough pressure on the British to move. With Clinton and Hume and Albert Reynolds in the nineties it worked. That's all over now, a distant memory. The single biggest shock for the republican leadership since December has been the shattering of that consensus as the Irish government ganged up on them with the British. The clincher was the Downing Street meeting where the PSNI chief constable and Garda Commissioner both attended. What a message.
The two governments have in effect changed the terms of the IRA ceasefire from merely a 'cessation of all military operations' to a total end to IRA activity. Scandalously the two governments turned a blind eye to robberies, punishment attacks and in the mid-nineties the killing of drug dealers. As the Taoiseach said in the Dail, "this was tolerated in order to try to move the process forward. However ten years on [after the ceasefire] we cannot continue to do that". Amazingly the Taoiseach went on, "I did not show anger regarding earlier events" and then listed heists at Makro and Gallahers and Strabane totalling several million pounds. "We in this House took that coolly enough." Can you believe it?
Now here's the point. In case you hadn't noticed, those IRA robberies took place in what is laughingly called 'this jurisdiction'. So why was the Taoiseach referring to them? First, if Tony Blair had admitted his government had taken them 'coolly enough' as part of their secret understanding with the IRA about the nature of their ceasefire, the Daily Mail and the Sun would have gone ballistic. Secondly, it's the Irish government, not the British telling the IRA the game's up.
Ahern went further. He also roughly dispensed with the fiction that governments have played along with for more than a decade that the leaderships of the IRA and Sinn Féin are separate entities. Make no mistake, when he met Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness they were told the IRA has to go out of business. The message is so much more powerful coming from the Taoiseach because it signalled the collapse of the pivotal relationship which has held the peace process together since the late eighties, namely the solid, virtually unquestioning support of Irish governments for SF's strategy as it moved into democratic politics.
The unequivocal message Ahern delivered is that the continued existence of the IRA and progress towards democratic politics are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, he holds the political leadership of the republican movement responsible for delivering an end to the IRA and will no longer buy the nonsense of being unable to placate the 'hard men'.That explains the note of consternation in the long IRA statement. The governments have changed the basis of the peace process and only the Taoiseach could do it. He told them the game's up. Put it another way. They think it's all over – it is now.
