(by Ed Moloney, Sunday Tribune)

If, as now seems to be the case, the IRA leadership is readying the ground amongst its members and supporters for an act of decommissioning it will not come as such a great shock to those observers who have closely watched this Republican leadership managing other U-turns along the road to the Good Friday Agreement.

It is arguable, for instance, that accepting the principle of Unionist consent (the Downing Street Declaration in other words) and the dropping of Northern abstentionism (accepting the Good Friday Agreement) were ideologically more vital concessions for Republicans to make yet in both cases masterful management by the Sinn Féin and IRA leadership ensured relatively smooth passages for both.

The fact that decommissioning has proved a much more formidable issue to resolve is testament in the eyes of many students of the Provos to that organisation's roots in the Catholic Defender movement rather than Wolfe Tone republicanism.

The Provos, it must never be forgotten, were born out of the ashes of Bombay Street in August 1969; their initial appeal thirty years ago was to the deep atavistic fear in Belfast's working class Catholic population of a Loyalist pogrom. That fear, that view of Loyalism produced the thesis of an irreformable Northern state out of which naturally sprang the IRA's armed struggle directed at making the less immutable British move.

Getting rid of the guns with its connotations of stripping away communal defence was therefore always going to be the most difficult issue in the peace process, so difficult that some advised it might be better to avoid it altogether given the potential of a split that could threaten the peace process and de-stabilise an IRA leadership otherwise fully committed to ending armed struggle.

For a variety of reasons - British funk, the persistence of IRA militarism and the internal politics of Unionism - decommissioning stayed at or near the top of the peace process agenda. With the benefit of hindsight it is now apparent that the Republican leadership recognised that fairly early on and realised it would have to be dealt with.

The problem was twofold: how to extract the maximum concessions from the British and the Unionists in return and how to manage the republican base so that if there was a decommissioning concession it could be handled so as to not appear as surrender. How to minimise the split in other words.

Even though there is evidence that the organisation is now preparing the way for a concession on IRA weapons it would be foolish to assume that the exercise is going to be entirely successful. After all decommisioning was the line in the sand that IRA and Sinn Féin leaders assured their people time and time again would never be crossed. In the words of one IRA/SF supremo reportedly spoken to a Dublin supporter: "They (the Brits) are not even going to get a matchstick".

Nevertheless the odds must be that Adams and McGuinness have got the timing right. If the venture is successful and culminates with Sinn Féin in government few will be able to deny that this Republican leadership has perhaps been the most skilled, not to say craftiest managers of their own people in the history of the physical force tradition.

One of the keys to understanding how this and other aspects of the peace process have been managed is the way, from fairly early on in this leadership's tenure, the 'tactic' was elevated and substituted inexorably for the 'principle'.

It began in the IRA way back in the 1970's in small but significant ways. For decades, for instance, IRA members refused to recognise the courts in either jurisdiction on the basis that they were partitionist institutions. This current leadership argued then that this 'principle' obstructed the struggle. A sensible 'tactic' would be to recognise the courts and keep IRA men out of jail to fight the war. And so it came to be.

The same pragmatic approach was applied some years later to Sinn Féin when it decided to fight elections and recognise the Dail. The republican 'principle' preached against doing such things but a 'tactical' course promised to advance the struggle by widening support. Danny Morrison's gospel of the "armalite and ballot box" was the purest expression of this way. For those seeking a radical new politics this was perhaps the only way to inject flexibility into an otherwise dogmatic, rigid ideology.

Because it was so successful - IRA men were kept out of jail and votes were won - the new line secured widespread support within the grassroots and was increasingly accepted as the right way to do things. The leader-architects, whose parallel commitment to armed struggle seemed so solid, were praised for their wisdom and skill and given even more scope and freedom of action.

The peace process was in many ways the natural outworking of all this. It was sold to the republican base as a tactic to achieve the same goal as armed struggle and all the concessions made - accepting consent, a Stormont parliament and so on - described similarly as moves designed either to wrongfoot the Unionist/British opposition or to advance Sinn Féin's electoral strategy in either or both jurisdictions.

The Republican approach to the decommissioning issue has been similarly 'tactical'. Only once in the various statements made by the IRA on the subject since 1994 was there an unequivocal expression of opposition to disarming and that was shortly after the first ceasefire broke down in 1996 when this leadership came within an ace of being ousted. Every other statement was in one way or another qualified or less than absolute, leaving the door open to pragmatic movement.

There is another crucial characteristic of the Republican approach to the peace process which can also be found in the approach to decommissioning. This was to permit, apparently unwillingly, heretical items to be placed on the negotiating table in the knowledge that the the passage of time would eventually render acceptable what was once inadmissible.

A perfect example of this was the way the Downing Street Declaration (DSD) was managed. The republican leadership knew that if its electoral and political enterprise was to be advanced then Sinn Féin had to accept Unionist consent; to join the constitutional game it had to sign up to the club's rules, to accept the Declaration. The problem was that the IRA and Sinn Féin base saw Unionist consent as their Clause Four; it defined their politics.

And so officially the SF and IRA leadership denied any hand in the authorship of the Declaration (even though we now know it was composed in collaboration with them) when it was published. There was even a famous mural to that effect a few doors away from SF's Falls Road HQ which managed to survive a few months.

The leadership did not accept the DSD but neither did they reject it and by refusing to reject it out of hand they ensured that the Declaration became the only game in town. Their base had to address it. So by August of 1994 the republican grassroots had arrived at a point of acquiescence in the DSD rather similar to a footballer who disapproves of the offside rule but agrees to play all the same.

It has been a similar story with decommissioning except the salami slicing exercise has necessarily been longer and much slower. It started with the republicans disavowing decommissioning but agreeing nevertheless to deal with the Mitchell Body, a move which was uncannily similar to the simultaneous rejection and acceptance of the DSD. The process of movement towards decommissioning continued from theron with subtle but meaningful changes.

Opposition to disarming under any circumstances became opposition to decommissioning prior to talks. Opposition to prior decommissioning then changed to no decommissioning until a deal was done.

Decommissioning that looked like surrender was rejected but voluntary decommissioning was a different thing. In the event of a political deal being agreed disarming couldn't start before an Executive was set up. But if we all 'jumped together', the Executive and disarming happening at the same time, then it was possible.

Defensive weapons couldn't go but offensive ones like Semtex might. Decommissioning could not happen "within the next few weeks" or even this year but by May 2000, maybe.

And so on to the stage it seems we have now reached where 'tactical' decommissioning can happen after an Executive has been established.

One view of all this is that it was clever negotiating by the republican side, using grassroots opposition to decommissioning to ensure that Sinn Féin was safely in government before a bullet would be handed over. There is truth in that, no doubt. But this was also an exercise in managing the republican base, one which got the grassroots slowly used to the idea that there could be gain as well as pain in disarming.

The genius negotiators are those who achieve more than one objective with the same single strategy. If Messrs Adams and McGuinness are successful in this enterprise many will feel they have earned such a description. We'll know in the next few days.

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