CONNECT: The core of the North's conflict has always been about sovereignty of identity. Attempts this week to decommission the decommissioning issue brought us to the epicentre of that core - the issue of parity of self-esteem. Ian Paisley demanded "humiliation" and the IRA refused, even though producing photographs of decommissioning was arguably in its political interest.
Nobody should be surprised: at its core, the conflict's not about logic. It's deeper than that because it operates at the level of instinct which ultimately governs self-definition. Whether you or I consider IRA and/or DUP people to be thugs, dupes or heroes is largely irrelevant. The crucial matter is to recognise, not endorse or ridicule the belligerents' senses of themselves.
These are as much about feelings as ideas. Although it seems trifling and exasperating to some observers, a republican cannot accept that after 'drawing' with the forces of a monarchy, he should have to behave in a way not demanded of his enemy.
After all, not feeling lesser than his enemy is the essence, indeed the whole point, of his republicanism.
To him, 'humiliation' demands not only that he repudiate his ideology but that he betray himself as a person. Critics of his position may argue that if he has used or supported the use of violence, he has forfeited the right to anything so human as a sense of himself as a person. But that view dehumanises him and the cycle continues . . .
Nonetheless, it's true that many ordinary unionists retain a valid fear of the IRA. For such people, published photographic evidence of decommissioning is not necessarily a matter of IRA humiliation and surrender, though it can be that too.
However, when last Sunday, Ian Paisley used the 'H' word, the possibility of republicans agreeing to his demand was scuppered.
It was scuppered because core self-identity on the unionist - especially the hardline unionist - side is such that adherents believe equality for republicans undermines the allegiance of the unionist North to the British crown. In principle, the conflict was either a warranted low-level war or just a gang of thugs acting criminally against a rightful state.
The IRA saw their war as waged against the British army; the DUP considered the IRA to be attacking unionists, as unionist paramilitaries attacked Irish nationalists and republicans. The Northern state was either a failed and morally illegitimate political entity or a valid and morally legitimate one. The conflict cleaved the gap between ethics and law into a chasm.
Irish history drips with examples of conflict over such immutable cores. The split over a forced oath of allegiance to the British crown, which caused the 'brother against brother' civil war in the then Free State, was based on the irreducible fact that you can't be a republican loyal to a monarch. Likewise the 1981 republican hunger strikes: political prisoners or common criminals? Feelings cannot run deeper. Pragmatists might decide that the common good is best served by going through the motions and treating a demand, as De Valera did in 1927 over taking the oath of allegiance, as "an empty political formula". But the IRA and the DUP cannot be utter pragmatists: at core, each organisation must remain ideological to validate their senses of themselves.
Here in the Republic and even more so in disinterested Britain, many people have given up on the North. Some apathy and weariness is understandable but a pathetic and ignorant attitude too often prevails. It's the attitude which claims not to understand "those people" and wishes the North could be detached from the wonderful rest of us to float off into the Atlantic.
Yet most people in contemporary Ireland and Britain have been sufficiently fortunate to have personal histories which have caused the ancient ethnic passions to abate. Indeed, for most people - and the same will occur in the North - the abated passions are now so dormant that they appear primitive, absurd and even embarrassing. Despite that, they're always there.
Condemning Sinn Féin and DUP politicians exposes our partisanship as much as theirs. Sure, people must ultimately come down on one side or the other. For what it's worth, it seems to me that verifiable decommissioning had become a reasonable demand but published photographs intended to humiliate could never be. Supremacism and egalitarianism cannot be reconciled.
Therein is the immutable core of the conflict. It's less about pragmatism and political good sense than about instinctual feelings which constitute identity at its deepest level. At the core of identity lie symbols - flags, colours, myths - which are not always amenable to reason. They are too charged for that. It was telling that neither Bertie Ahern nor Tony Blair blamed either side.
Memory too is at the core of identity. On the Sinn Féin side, gerrymandering, pogroms and Bloody Sunday are recalled; on the unionist side it's car-bombs, RUC casualties and Enniskillen.
It's easy to see that both sides were morally wrong in many of their actions. It's more difficult to recognise the limits of logic but reasonable to suggest that the 'H' word blocked all hopes of a deal.