THE old dread is back in Northern Ireland. With politics effectively stalled and the IRA campaign back in motion, people fear another spiral of violence.
The IRA leadership and one can fairly assume that the order for the murders of the RUC officers in Lurgan came from the very top knew the pressure the attack would put on loyalist paramilitaries.
Several callers to BBC and RTE phone-in programmes said yesterday they had been "duped" into voting for Sinn Fein in recent elections. They were voting for peace, the platform on which Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness campaigned, not murder, they said.
The callers, along with politicians and commentators, expressed puzzlement as to why the IRA would act so brutally at a time when there was such a possibility of political progress. They implicitly viewed Sinn Fein and the IRA as part of the same republican family, despite Sinn Fein's insistence that they are separate entities.
In murdering RUC Constables Roland Graham and David Johnston the IRA might merely have been reiterating that "they haven't gone away, you know". Trying to find a rationale thereafter is difficult.
For months now the republican movement has called for inclusive negotiations involving Sinn Fein. The guarantee of such talks would lead directly to an IRA ceasefire the British and Irish governments were promised.
On the back of its pledge that a vote for Sinn Fein was a vote for peace, the party made major gains in the Westminster and local elections.
Gains had been made on the political front as well. Soon after his election as British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair made Northern Ireland one of his chief priorities.
In tandem with Mr Blair's efforts to reactivate the peace process, the new Northern Secretary Dr Mo Mowlam, pledged that future talks involving Sinn Fein would not become bogged down over decommissioning, even if that was the strategy of the unionist parties.
She also promised the talks would not drag on interminably envisaging their conclusion by May next year.
These were important commitments, as they substantially conceded the republican movement's chief demands that the talks would not become a "conference on decommissioning", and that the talks should be time-limited.
Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, Mr Martin McGuinness, and other senior personnel held two meetings with British officials. The first was successful but the second encounter proved difficult. When Sinn Fein would enter talks after an IRA ceasefire, and other issues, needed clarification, Sinn Fein said.
A third meeting was arranged when it could be reasonably presumed in the light of the public assurances already given by Dr Mowlam that Sinn Fein would have obtained additional clarification. But the IRA was not prepared to wait, as was so grimly illustrated on the streets of Lurgan on Monday afternoon.
What follows next could be terribly predictable unless senior politicians in the loyalist fringe parties can sell an argument to the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) that a loyalist backlash will merely serve the interests of the IRA; difficult work in the current circumstances, as everybody, including the IRA, realises.
Two questions are raised about the IRA's motivation. Firstly, were the murders a re-establishment of the republican movement's strategy of an "Armalite in one hand and a ballot box in the other"? Secondly, did the shootings point to a split in the republican movement, between the so-called hawks and doves?
Mr Adams, who gave a press conference in west Belfast yesterday, implicitly and explicitly addressed both questions. He "categorically" said "Sinn Fein is not the IRA" and implicitly said there was no rift within the IRA. In fact, much of his press conference could be interpreted as a statement that Mr Adams remains almost obsessively committed to ensuring there is no split.
The implication was that there are still people to be persuaded of the merits of the peace process, and he would continue with that work. "I work in an environment where I seek to lead people and to bring ....... to new notions and concepts," he said.
While he continues his work Northern Ireland is again in a political vacuum which, as has generally happened in the past, may be filled by violence.
However unlikely the prospects were of Mr David Trimble engaging in some form political dialogue with Sinn Fein, say, one week ago, they have now faded almost to vanishing point.
Mr John Hume is still prepared to talk but even here there are indications that his patience is not endless.
Mr Bertie Ahern will be very cautious now, and the British government, while not totally closing the door, will be very suspicious of any future overtures from Sinn Fein.
On a day when people looked forward to the coming weeks and months with great foreboding, the Rev Roy Magee, who has the ear of the loyalist paramilitaries, at least wondered if the IRA was making one "last kick" before embarking on a ceasefire.
This was a reference to the manner in which the IRA made a point of escalating its campaign by murdering prominent loyalists before calling its cessation of violence of August 31st, 1994.
It was a highly qualified expression of hope, but it was all people had to look to yesterday.
