To describe the IRA arms inspection exercise as a "confidence-boosting measure" is more appropriate than using the term "decommissioning".
The weapons inspected by Mr Ahtisaari and Mr Ramaphosa are almost certainly the bulk infantry weapons brought into this State by the IRA during the 1980s. There might also be older weapons imported in the 1970s from the United States and newer arms acquired since from European sources. It is estimated the IRA has as many as 1,000 assault rifles, mostly AK47s but also a variety of European and US-manufactured weapons. Most of its original stock of AR15 Armalites was either found by security forces or sent back to the United States to be auctioned at IRA fund-raising events.
Four major shipments of arms reached the IRA from Libya between August 1985 and September 1986; these were between 113 tons and 154 tons of weapons valued on the open arms market at around £50 million. The key element of the shipment was the stock of Semtex plastic explosive.
Col Muammar Gadafy, the Libyan leader who had pledged support to many so-called freedom fighters around the world, gave some six tons of this deadly material to the IRA between 1985 and 1986. The last Garda estimates, from about the end of the last IRA ceasefire in 1997, was that about half of these six tons was used or seized in the intervening years.
It is not clear how much Semtex is left, and it is known that some has been taken by the anti-Belfast Agreement republicans belonging to the "Real" and Continuity IRAs. However, much of the weaponry imported from Libya has stayed in the bunkers. It is simply not needed for the type of "low-intensity" campaign which the IRA waged from the mid-1970s on.
Even as the bulk shipments of weapons were arriving from Libya, the IRA procurement people were turning again to the United States to look for sophisticated weapons and electronic devices that could help them around the increasingly sophisticated electronic defences being put in place by the British army and RUC.
The push for greater technical sophistication was driven by the IRA's declared aim of shooting down British helicopters. By the end of the 1970s the British army and RUC were completely dependent on helicopters to reach the heavily defended positions in south Armagh and east Tyrone.
British army aircraft were being protected by radar jamming, and helicopters in vulnerable areas were equipped with exhaust vents to reduce the amount of hot gases that attract heat-seeking missiles. Flares were also used in some areas where surface-to-air attacks were thought most likely.
In the event, the IRA fired only two surface-to-air missiles at helicopters, in Fermanagh and Armagh, and both missed.
On a number of occasions the IRA used the Russian-manufactured DMSK .5 machineguns to try to shoot down low-flying helicopters. These did cause damage to aircraft, and caused at least one to crash-land. However, through the 25-year IRA campaign no British soldiers were killed in attacks on helicopters. The only casualties were through accidents.
With its lack of ideological baggage, the IRA was always able to switch from dealing with revolutionary groups in Europe or the Middle East to right-wing or organised criminal groups in the United States. Throughout the 1980s the IRA was acquiring weapons from both the United States and its arch-enemy, Col Gadafy.
An IRA man from Dublin who worked as an electrical engineer was sent to the United States to make contact with a Boston man who worked on missile technology with a major arms manufacturer. Other IRA technicians followed. Subsequent seizures by the FBI read more like catalogue lists from Radio Shack.
From this relationship came a new direction in the IRA's campaign. The classic insurgency path where a low-level guerrilla war leads to a standing army and direct assault on the State was abandoned. In came sophisticated new thinking about targeting and bombing. IRA tactics and attacks switched from ambushes on police officers in rural areas to hugely destructive bomb attacks on the City of London.
As symbolically important as all the military equipment from Libya may have been, it was obsolete almost as soon as it arrived. By late 1982 the IRA had acquired new radio receiving and switching equipment that would enable it to get around the electronic defences being deployed by the British. One of the key devices was the FX-401 tone frequency selector switch which, when mated to a particular transmission code, responded only to its commands.
In 1984 the FBI seized another batch of these switches which had been routed through Mexico and back into the United States.
Throughout the 1980s the IRA continued to smuggle small shipments of 50 or 100 weapons from the United States. Increasingly these weapons included electronic parts which the IRA was increasingly using to manufacture its own tailor-made weapons.
The first realisation of how sophisticated the IRA had become was in 1993 when the Garda Special Branch raided a house in Kilcock, Co Kildare. In the attic they found a small but highly organised and portable factory which could be used to make a variety of arms parts. It had been recently involved in making incendiary bombs and timer-power units (TPUs) for bigger bombs.
All these parts incorporated micro-switches and circuit boards. The notebook-sized incendiary bombs cost very little to manufacture, were foolproof to use and could cause millions of pounds' worth of damage when left in department stores. The TPUs removed almost any risk from priming car-bombs.
Later in 1994 the Garda uncovered another factory making mortars and grenades in the Slieve Bloom Mountains.
In the evolution of its "homemade" weaponry the IRA developed 17 mortars, from 60mm right up to the 200-kilo "barrack buster" devices. It also manufactured a variety of shoulder-launched projectiles for firing grenades. There was also a variety of "improvised" grenades from the "coffee jar" bombs to "drogue" bombs which were also cheap and easy to manufacture but very deadly.
In the 1980s the IRA also developed a number of "horizontal" mortars based on the Russian "sagar" missile much favoured by the Islamic Resistance fighters of Hizbullah in Lebanon.
The concurrent use of this type of weapon showed that the IRA was sharing information on weapons and tactics with groups like Hizbullah, often meeting at secret conventions in Middle Eastern or other Mediterranean countries. The Garda successes, particularly in discovering the Kilcock factory, however, forced the IRA technicians on the run and disrupted the arms-manufacturing capability. It never fully recovered and became redundant as the ceasefires and peace process progressed.