ANALYSIS: The insistence of photographic confirmation of the full and final decommissioning of the Provisional IRA's weapons is a political red herring, writes Tom Clonan.
This week the DUP claimed that photographic evidence confirming full decommissioning would lend "transparency" to the decommissioning process. In fact, it would do no such thing.
It would be impossible to conclusively document through still images the destruction of the entire IRA weapons inventory for many reasons.
These include their wide dispersal throughout the island, and the inability of the IRA leadership to locate all its weapons caches.
In addition, given the latest digital technologies, it would be impossible to certify the provenance of such photographic images, or to prove they represented an exhaustive visual account of the destruction of all weapons.
Indeed, the original confidentiality clause agreed between Gen John de Chastelain and the IRA as outlined in the Belfast Agreement was in part predicated on the IRA's inability to fully or authoritatively account for its own weapons and ammunition.
That inability is not without international precedent. The reasons are relatively straightforward.
To begin with, IRA arms shipments reaching Ireland during the Troubles had to be quickly unloaded and distributed to active service units to avoid seizure. These weapons would then have been further dispersed amongst sympathisers within the community. This process would have taken place in a fraught, pressurised environment, and in the interests of secrecy with no central written record.
Over the years, a steady attrition rate took its toll on the IRA arsenal. On both sides of the Border, the security forces made large seizures of weapons on the basis of tip-offs from informants and intelligence sources.
Further caches were seized in searches of lands and properties, often owned by elderly republican sympathisers.
In some cases, rifles, pistols and Semtex were lost due to the inability of IRA members to pinpoint the location of hidden weapons. Often buried at night, and with the passage of time, many IRA volunteers simply could not remember where weapons were hidden.
Such limitations were tragically highlighted in recent years with the confusion surrounding the exact location of bodies of the "disappeared". In time, much of this lost material will eventually come to light. This is already the case with weapons hidden by the old IRA during the War of Independence and Civil War.
Every year the Defence Forces
"decommission" first World War vintage Mills grenades and an assortment of weapons and ammunition hidden in haste during the 1920s.
It is likely that, in time, Defence Forces' ordnance disposal teams will be called upon to deal with rusting AK-47s and caches of Semtex hidden in farms, attics and hedgerows.
Ireland is not the only European country to have such an environmental hazard to contend with. In the former Yugoslavia, in a dynamic similar to that experienced by IRA active service units, competing factions in the civil war distributed hundreds of thousands of anti-tank mines, anti-personnel mines, automatic rifles and ammunition to able-bodied citizens throughout their respective communities.
Even within conventional armies there are problems concerning accountability of weapons.
Throughout the Troubles the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) - now the Royal Irish Regiment - saw British army weapons falling into the hands of paramilitary groupings.
In the uncontrolled environment within which the IRA operated during this period, weapons often went missing at the hands of dissident groupings.
Indeed, one prominent dissident is a former quartermaster of the IRA.
For these reasons, the leadership of the Provisional IRA cannot state exactly the quantity of weapons and ammunition that was misappropriated during republican schisms.
Ironically, even if the Provisional IRA was in a position to provide photographs that purported to show the destruction of every gun and ounce of Semtex, there would still be problems for sceptics of the peace process.
With the numbers of weapons entering the Republic each month in drugs shipments, any small and determined group of dissidents could restart a guerrilla war within days. The IRA's decommissioning process is merely a statement of intent; an act of good faith. In light of these facts, Ian Paisley's demands for photographic evidence would appear politically motivated, designed to bolster his image as the die-hard unionist who finally humiliated the IRA.
Unfortunately for all of us, his political epitaph may well consist of just one word: No.
Dr Tom Clonan is a retired army officer. He lectures in the school of media, DIT.