(by Ed Moloney, Sunday Tribune)

Those who are getting carried away by last week’s talk of crisis and collapse hitting the Good Friday institutions and even of the peace process itself crumbling away to usher back into our midst the violence of the past should cast their minds back to early September 1995 when the (first) IRA ceasefire was but a year old, John Bruton was Taoiseach and Sir Patrick Mayhew the representative in Belfast of John Major’s Conservative government.

The two governments were proposing to hold a summit meeting to pronounce a common position on IRA decommissioning and both administraions had arrived at tough public positions on the issue. Earlier in March during a trip to the US, Mayhew had unveiled his so-called “Washington Three” preconditions for Sinn Féin’s entry into political talks. These were a declaration in principle by the IRA of its willingness to disarm, an agreement on modalities of decommissioning and lastly some confidence building measures to show the genuineness of its intent.

John Bruton hadn’t quite gone as far as that but nevertheless unlike his Fianna Fail predecessor and successors, he also placed IRA disarming at centre stage of the peace process. At the last moment the summit was cancelled. The angry British accused Bruton of caving into Sinn Féin pressure while in Ireland stories were circulated that Provisional leaders had warned of “bodies in the streets” if the two governments had proceeded with the summit and enunciated an uncompromising common position on decommissioning.

The leaked stories were badly misinterpreted. The reference to “bodies in the streets” was taken to mean that the IRA would go back to war and resume it’s killing. The “bodies” would be those of its victims and the leak was a threat. In fact the phrase was meant to refer to the fate that would surely overtake any Sinn Féin or IRA leader who persisted with the peace strategy in the face of such a joint British-Irish line on IRA weapons.

What we didn’t fully know at that point was that the ceasefire was under enormous internal strain, that the bulk of the IRA on the ground and at the highest levels was opposed to it and was increasingly critical of the Adams-McGuinness leadership for persisting with it. Five months later the huge bomb at Canary Wharf brought the first cessation to an abrupt end.

Six years on, almost exactly, a great deal has changed. Sir Patrick Mayhew’s “Washington Three” demands have been met, almost in full although not in return for participation in talks but for participation in government. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have established full control of the IRA Army Council while the bulk of Provisional supporters appear to have been won over by recent election results to a strategy many were initially uncomfortable with.

And just look at the progress that has been made on the issue of IRA arms. Six years ago when the Bruton-Mayhew summit collapsed the notion that the Provisional IRA, not just the IRA, but the Provisional IRA would agree to get rid of its weapons was so far fetched that the bulk of observers refused even to entertain the thought. Those who did were mocked.

Selected and select journalists were given briefings at the highest Army Council level that decommissioning would never happen - which they believed - while the rank and file were constantly assured, by word of leadership mouth and by the graffiti at their gable ends that “not an ounce, not a bullet” would be decommissioned. P O’Neill even went on record; there would be no decommissioning by either the front door or the back door, he said. Danny Morrison said he would eat his hat if it ever happened.

What we are seeing now is decommissioning by the back door. It doesn’t involve an act of surrender, there will be no IRA men dragged in chains up Royal Avenue to pile the AK-47’s at the feet of John Reid; it will all be done voluntarily and surreptitiously, possibly by cementing in the arsenals, possibly by other means, and witnessed only by disinterested outsiders but it will be decommissioning nevertheless.

The story of how we got from “bodies in the streets” to “cement in the dumps” is not only a fascinating one but instructive as well. It reveals how carefully and cautiously and indeed how brilliantly Gerry Adams has managed not just this strategy but the entirety of the Provisionals' long journey from revolutionary warfare to (almost) constitutional politics. Even though Adams and his allies have enormously tightened their control over the IRA since that bad September of 1995 these qualities have still characterised their handling of events.

If one had to isolate the stratagem that was common to all phases of the journey it was Adams' ability to camouflage ideological u-turns in the battle dress of war. Two examples jump to mind, but they are only two of many. One was the decision to embrace leftist political activity back in the late 1970’s, something that smacked of Cathal Goulding’s dreaded reformism. It was sold to the IRA on the basis that such activity would broaden the support base and enable the IRA to fight the long war and was accepted on that basis. But over time the real consequence of the shift was that it brought the Provos into electoral politics and then to the peace strategy.

Another was the decision to recognise the Dail in 1986, a piece of heresy which was justified on the grounds that once Sinn Féin had TD’s then no Free State government would dare introduce internment. The idea that Sinn Féin could win seats in the Dail at that time was nonsense of course but the IRA went for it. The result was that slowly and softly the Provos moved towards a fuller recognition of the Southern state, a necessary precondition for the pan-Nationalism that fuelled the peace strategy.

The journey to decommissioning has been managed in a not dissimilar fashion. Each move towards a process of putting weapons completely and verifiably beyond use has been crafted in such a way that its lack of completeness was guaranteed to anger Unionists and irritate the British.(Peter Mandelson was in this sense a godsend for the Provos.) In the brouhaha that would inevitably follow each small shift the spotlight would be on the Unionists’ protests and inflexibility or the British anger rather than on the ideological flip-flop performed by P O’Neill and his friends. Concession would be presented as another victory in the eternal conflict, a triumph for Sinn Féin’s ring craft.

And so it was last week. When P O’Neill announced agreement with General de Chastelain on the modalities for decommissioning the absence of a timetable meant that the focus of attention switched to the protests and unreasonableness of Unionists and to the crisis that would now befall the Good Friday Agreement. At the level of the average IRA volunteer and Sinn Féin supporter in West Belfast and elsewhere this sort of thing works.

Underneath all this, of course, the great IRA concession has been made but in such a way that it is almost palatable to the Provo base. Seen from this perspective and in the knowledge that the next step, actual decommissioning, will happen either in the next six weeks of contrived life for the Good Friday institutions, or the six weeks after that, last week’s “crisis” makes perfect sense.