LAST week Sinn Fein pulled out all the stops in a damage-limitation exercise. It had been seriously hurt by Mr John Hume's assertion that voting for Sinn Fein, in the absence of an IRA ceasefire, would be the equivalent of supporting "the killing of innocent human beings".

With a British general election less than three months away, Mr Gerry Adams utilised the tactic which had worked so brilliantly in the Northern Ireland elections last June. He promised peace - just around the corner. All the floating nationalist vote had to do was to support Sinn Fein.

Never mind the IRA's "armed struggle". Sinn Fein wanted to "rebuild the peace process and secure a permanent peace". It was prepared to make representations to its controlling wing just as soon as certain conditions were met by the British government.

Those conditions included the removal of preconditions to negotiations. Mr Adams declared: "Given its destructive effect, the arms decommission precondition needs to be removed and in a way which prevents the erection of this obstacle again at some point in the future...

"Given the importance of this objective, the approach should be one which is most likely to succeed, rather than one which blocks and disrupts the wider negotiations which are based on the principle that nothing is, agreed until everything is agreed."

In other words, Mr Adams wants to dine a Ia carte from the Mitchell Report, which proposed a compromise between the British government's "Washington Three" test, involving substantial arms decommission before talks, and the IRA's assertion that there will be no decommission, either through the front or the back door before a political settlement.

Mr Mitchell wrote: "The parties should consider an approach under which some decommissioning would take place during the process of all-party negotiations, rather than before or after as the parties now urge. Such an approach represents a compromise. . . If the peace process is to move forward the current impasse must be overcome."

Even though the British government has reluctantly accepted the Mitchell formula on decommissioning, the unionist parties have not. They are still demanding prior decommissioning. And a move to officially "park" the issue until the end of negotiations, as a trade-off for an IRA ceasefire, would almost certainly see them leave the talks.

Mr Bertie Ahern was so concerned by the new demand that he chose, last Monday in Belfast, to be blunt and to the point. Republicans did not, he said, seem to realise how much their negotiating position was undermined by IRA violence. And he warned them against "making extra demands on other parties and governments".

"It is a misunderstanding of the situation to be attempting to lay down new preconditions. Their present position is simply not politically tenable."

Calling for an immediate IRA ceasefire, Mr Ahern said that if Sinn Fein didn't make "the best of what is currently on offer", it would face increasing political isolation.

Two days earlier Mr Bruton suggested that a way round the IRA's difficulty with arms decommissioning lay in its acceptance of the principle of consent. If republicans accepted that the position of Northern Ireland would not change without the agreement of a majority, then the nature of their assumptions about the peace process would change.

"Sinn Fein sees itself approaching a military negotiation with important political objectives and consequences. All the other participants see themselves approaching a political negotiation with some paramilitary aspects that need to be sorted out to facilitate political agreement."

It, the Taoiseach said, one party to the multidimensional consensus-building process retained the right to hold and use guns to influence the outcome, that made the job of reaching consensus more difficult.

SINN Fein was getting the message. Mr Hume, Mr Ahern and Mr Bruton were all singing from the same hymn sheet. The republican movement had to give up violence for good. Democratic methods were the only acceptable ones.

Meanwhile, an internal debate between Sinn Fein and the IRA may have reopened, but Mr Adams's newspaper article has failed to move the situation forward.

Sinn Fein is promising peace on terms unbearable to unionists and unacceptable to the British government.

Talking peace while making war has been elevated to an art form by the republican movement in its efforts to attract nationalist votes. In the run-in to the Northern Ireland elections and the promised all-party negotiations last June, Sinn Fein asked for a strong mandate to encourage the IRA to make peace and to send a message to Mr Major that they wanted inclusive talks. The party received its highest-ever vote.

Mr Hume now recalls:"The republican movement claimed an increased mandate for their strategy and within weeks they had broken their de-facto ceasefire in the North, threatening to plunge us back into a full-scale resumption of violence on both sides."

Democrats on both sides of the Border are determined that it will not happen again. Sinn Fein will not be allowed to present itself before the electorate as a party of peace while the IRA continues its murderous campaign.

The floating nationalist vote is not attracted by the strategy of "an Armalite in one hand and a ballot box in the other". The vast majority of the population wants an end to the stalemated war and the senseless killing.

Mr Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness insist that they want these things too - they helped to deliver an IRA ceasefire of 18 months. But that was in the past. Before Canary Wharf and Manchester and the resumption of the bombing and killing in Northern Ireland. Today, new initiatives are required. And compromise is necessary.

A window of opportunity still exists for the IRA to call a pre-election ceasefire. Nobody really expects it, but if it doesn't happen, Sinn Fein need not expect any quarter when it comes to the election.