'Acts of completion' may not be tied to Unionists returning to the Executive, writes Frank Millar, London Editor.
Has something gone terribly wrong in Tony Blair's dialogue with Sinn Féin? Or might the British government be developing an agenda with republicans which the Prime Minister has yet to share with the rest of us?
The line of questioning suggests itself in light of the latest indications of Sinn Féin's approach to the negotiations about IRA and British "acts of completion" designed to secure the future of the Belfast Agreement.
For it would appear Sinn Féin can now contemplate a deal with the British which cuts out David Trimble and potentially - and rather more importantly - a majority of unionists in Northern Ireland.
Two articles published in the past few days certainly seem to sustain the possibility outlined on these pages three weeks ago that the widely expected republican "offer" might prove too little for Mr Trimble but enough to force Mr Blair's hand on calling Assembly elections in May in which Sinn Féin hopes finally to eclipse the SDLP.
Writing in the Irish Voice, the influential Irish-American commentator Mr Niall O'Dowd says that, while fundamental questions in the present negotiation remain unanswered, Sinn Féin has taken one calculated step. "They have made it clear that they want to move forward with or without Trimble."
This confirms a report in The Irish Times 11 days ago that some members of the Sinn Féin leadership were prepared to consider "unilateral" action by republicans - that is to say moves on "acts of completion" not necessarily tied to assurances that the Ulster Unionists would return to the power-sharing Executive.
Mr O'Dowd makes sense of this by explaining that whether it happens depends on Mr Blair. "He can do a historic deal with Irish nationalism over the next few weeks, but he must convince the Unionists that if they do not want to be part of a groundbreaking accommodation then he will go ahead without them. The choices seem clear." And the choices being proferred by Sinn Féin seem clearer still from Mitchel McLaughlin's wide-ranging interview in the Derry Journal.
Interestingly, Sinn Féin's national chairman reveals that a deal at this time with the British - on demilitarisation and the cessation of IRA activity - need not, and may not, extend to a resolution of the policing issue. This will be a blow to pro-agreement unionists who might have imagined that any "acts of completion" prescribed by Mr Blair would have to address the surely-unsustainable situation in which a party refuses to support the policing of the policy it helps to govern.
Of even more immediate and pressing concern to unionists will be this declaration by Mr McLoughlin: "Unionists have opposed almost every aspect of change proposed by the agreement and Tony Blair must make it clear that if they continue their obstruction that they will not be rewarded. If the agreement is Plan A, then there must be a Plan B and that has to be even more unpalatable to unionism than Plan A. The British must make it clear to unionism that if they do not want to accept the agreement, then they will be faced with Plan B." In other words - and hopefully this does no injustice to the eloquent Mr McLaughlin - the unionists can take the Belfast Agreement, or leave it and risk finding themselves left behind by an alternative political agenda over which they can expect to exercise no veto.
Somewhere in all of this Mr McLaughlin might be thought to have lost sight of the principle of consent, frequently described as the cornerstone of the Belfast accord. But then most unionists have always suspected the republican movement - and specifically the IRA - never fully signed up to that principle in the first place.
Moreover, and in fairness to Sinn Féin, the SDLP has also been at this in recent months, warning unionists that if they attempt to force a re-negotiation of the Belfast Agreement, they risk losing their remaining influence in the Northern Ireland of today and the "new Ireland" of tomorrow.
Some unionists detect more than a hint of fascism in this suggestion that the agreement represented a one-off, never-to-be-repeated opportunity for the unionist majority in Northern Ireland to determine their future.
The democratic reality, surely, is that consent given can always be withdrawn. It is perfectly valid for Sinn Féin and the SDLP to warn that any new unionist majority emerging from Assembly elections would find them unwilling to change any of the fundamentals of the 1998 agreement. It is right for Mr McLaughlin, in musing on the divided and wounded state of the current unionist leadership, to allow that a new configuration might emerge and that Sinn Féin might have to work through the unpredictable outcome of an election. It would seem highly dangerous on the other hand to tell unionists that their votes and wishes may be of no account.
We should not get too far ahead of the game. The scheduled election is months away, and the decision to hold it not yet taken. Moreover, the two governments might caution a health warning to be attached to any public pronouncements by parties to the present negotiation, and particularly to those of the parties from whom the most significant movement is expected.
There is also an apparent conflict between the seemingly renewed readiness of Sinn Féin to write off Mr Trimble and the private conviction of some in the republican hierarchy that Trimble's continuing leadership in fact still represents the best bet for the survival of the agreement.
If they are serious, however, those republican leaders must know that this latest rhetoric can only make unionists more distrustful of Sinn Féin's dialogue with Mr Blair, and further incline Mr Trimble to stay his hand until after any election. Of even more concern will be the knowledge that it might just have made more complex Mr Blair's calculations about the wisdom of calling the election in the first place. For it is not yet apparent that Sinn Féin and the British Prime Minister are working to the same script.