Does there lurk, somewhere in the IRA leadership, the last serious European revolutionary of the 20th century? As the century peters out, there can be no question it has been dominated in Europe by the early success and then failure of radical revolutionary projects. The recent espionage revelations served at least to remind us how many people devoted their lives to such idealism.
But they are now curiously irrelevant - the epoch opened by the Russian revolution of 1917 closed decisively in 1989. But what an irony if dull old Belfast, of all places, turned out to be the last place on the Continent where a spark of the old revolutionary zeal could still be found.
What is the evidence? Surely elements in the IRA leadership would not have contemplated such high-risk, high-cost activities as the Florida gun-running or various alleged assassinations, without being in possession of a coherent strategy which includes the serious option of a return to war? Against this, it has to be pointed out that the ceasefire strategy now in place for most of the period since 1994 implied a serious awareness on the part of the collective leadership of republicanism of the limits of the old military campaign.
Above all, republican leaders at this point do not have to make a definitive choice - as they are so often urged to so by unionists - between democracy and terror. The various provocations - the Florida gun-running being the most stark - could be part of a serious renewal of a revolutionary strategy or they could simply be a part of "strategy of tension" within the peace process, designed to make it harder for unionists to work the Good Friday agreement and thus earn the odium for its collapse.
If, as an increasing number of serious observers - including some traditionally hostile to this notion - claim, the republican movement is ceasing to be a monolith, it can, nonetheless, afford to play both sides of the street with impunity. The prospect of a unionism shorn of its historical triumphs in the negotiation of the agreement - the return of the Stormont Assembly, the acceptance by the Irish people of Northern Ireland's legitimacy within the UK - led by, say, Jeffrey Donaldson, who is unlikely ever to get a friendly hearing from the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, can only have republicans licking their lips in anticipation.
The cruel reality for pro-agreement unionists is ineluctable. Only in the period after the establishment of the executive will the republican movement be forced to make the hard decision to take the radical action of substantive decommissioning or collapse the executive by failure to do so and thus earn the increasingly well-advertised scorn of the British government, which has the power - and little incentive to do otherwise - to suspend anti-unionist initiatives sine die. The peace process will then have been driven to the point of self-destruction by republican inflexibility.
Intellectually, these points are widely understood within unionism, but emotionally and morally, the balance of forces still does not favour any radical move by David Trimble to break the deadlock.
The Patten Commission report - with its naively heavily-advertised dependence on sources which did not support the making of the agreement when it mattered - may have done for Mr Trimble. Mr Patten's claim that somehow Mr Trimble should have known the precise outcome was implicit in the Good Friday agreement ignores the history of the discussion of the issue in the last weeks of the talks and, indeed, in the days leading up to the appointment of the commission.
More substantively, Mr Trimble knows that the badge, say, of the RUC is not a republican badge, but then the agreement, as republicans always tell us, is not a republican agreement. It would have been far better if Mr Patten had said that his hard choices were dictated solely by the need to win more nationalist support for the new police service.
Mr Trimble has not been helped by the SDLP. Had he responded to the SDLP's call to resign as First Minister, the peace process would already be dead because it is most unlikely that Mr Trimble can find again the unionist votes necessary to be re-elected.
The broad nationalist middle-class SDLP constituency is in a sorry state. It has come to resemble in an uncanny way intellectually inert pre-Troubles middle-class unionism: a slightly pompous establishment, sharp-tongued and dismissive of the legitimate concerns of others and, above all, unable to grasp that the day when the British state dropped good things into the collective maw has just, with the delivery of the Patten report, passed away for good.
Angered by its recent marginalisation in the peace process, dismayed by the seemingly irreversible electoral rise of Sinn Fein, the SDLP is now hopelessly dependent - irony of ironies - on the much-maligned David Trimble to save it from itself by setting up an executive which would be the party's last chance to retain hegemony within Northern nationalism.
Given all this, David Trimble must be sorely tempted to walk away from the whole mess. But he cannot do so for the simple reason that he is the last remaining hope for stability in Northern Ireland and by logical extension, the island of Ireland as a whole.
Admittedly his survival does not guarantee stability - Irish nationalism may simply not be able to accept the boundaries of the agreement - but his failure guarantees long-term instability and communal recrimination. One fact is crucial: the forms of disunity with unionism are totally dysfunctional - a Paisley vote has long since ceased to be an insurance policy which deters the British government - while the forms of disunity within nationalism and republicanism have served to increase nationalist leverage over the system.
If the agreement survives, Mr Trimble has a shot at establishing unionist unity around a modernising programme as DUP ministers serve alongside his own. Mr Trimble's critics insist he should have done more during the year to defend the RUC or influence the government's agenda in other "reserved" areas. They may have a point - but surely the bigger question is this: how does a political community which is still a substantial majority manage so consistently to punch below its weight, and is there any chance of this changing - and change would also be to the long-term benefit of nationalist Ireland - in the absence of the full implementation of the agreement?
Paul Bew is visiting Burns scholar at Boston College.
