The most enjoyable headline - of many, be it said - over last weekend appeared in the Irish Independent on Saturday: "Provos ready to go the full distance for a peace deal." Really? Not even the opening paragraph justified that ludicrous assertion.
It read: "The IRA is prepared to go further than ever before in disposing of its weapons in an attempt to restore power sharing in Belfast. It is understood a statement has been drawn up in the name of P O'Neill - the signatory to all official communiqués from the IRA - which spells out plans for the "biggest act yet by the Provos in disposing of their arms." Spin, spin, spin. This nonsense reeks of the Department of Peace Process and Media Manipulation, and it was by no means confined to my friends in Middle Abbey Street but, rather, was spread across radio, television and newspapers.
So what actually happens when the media come close to the force-field of the peace process? Are owners of usually alert and sceptical minds transformed into a Billy Graham chorus, chanting hallelujah at every alleged Provo concession? Do they cease to see that what the unionists want is not merely peace, but also a consistent, unambiguous, uncompromised rule of law applied equally across the political board?
This does not mean a world in which the IRA performs "big acts" of decommissioning. Only people whose brains have been addled by the sanctimonious mumbo-jumbo of the peace process really believe that unionists will agree to sharing power with a Sinn Féin-IRA that has only half as many guns as five years ago. You cannot be half-pregnant, half-virginal, or half-armed. Either you are armed or you're not, and that is as unambiguous a certainty as you'll find in life.
Yet so many in the media continue to peddle the intellectual twaddle that concessions by P O'Neill, rúnaí, will keep the unionist people quiet, never mind the unionist people led by Ian Kyle Paisley. It is 40 years since Ian Paisley denounced the other O'Neill, Terence, then prime minister of Northern Ireland, for having talks with Sean Lemass, who was hardly soft on the IRA. He had served in two governments which had defeated IRA campaigns by firing squad, internment, flogging and solitary confinement with bread and water diets.
Are scholars of the peace process, peepeeologists, so unaware of the meaning of fundamentalist unionism that they think the DUP leader will go into government with a republican organisation which has some guns, but not as many as it used to have? Have they forgotten the trail of bodies which Ian Paisley has left in his political wake - O'Neill, Chichester Clark, Faulkner, and Trimble? The only unionist leader who survived the might of Paisleyism was James Molyneux - simply because he made no attempt to leap the unleapable.
All the other stuff in the peace process about policing and jointery (no, don't ask me to explain that, primarily because I can't,) demilitarisation and so on and so bloody forth are irrelevant without not merely the total decommissioning of the weapons of the IRA but also its formal disbandment, and the resignation beyond recall of P. O'Neill, rúnaí. Do you want to know what that looks like? It looks like a British high commissioner, stiff upper lip quivering just a trifle, as the union jack comes down one flagstaff, and another, gaudier flag is run up a parallel one, while some marines play A Life on the Ocean Wave. The he gets into his boat, wipes a tear away, and goes. That's it. Over. Into the sunset.
Now who genuinely believes that the IRA is going to do that? Who really believes that P. O'Neill, rúnaí, is really going to hang up his pen and his Peter the Painter? Nobody. Absolutely nobody.
Only those mesmerised by the weird and wonderful language of peepeeology think there is a way around the essential and inescapable contradiction: that the IRA is not going to go away, and the DUP is not going to share power with a party linked with a still-existent IRA.
You can have the peepeeology sub-committees discussing the division of power between first and second ministers, the role of Sinn Féin on policing boards, and the colour of the post-boxes in South Armagh. Similarly, the Malawian Ministry for Rocket Travel has endlessly fascinating discussions about the décor of the first-class passenger compartment in its spaceliner to the moon, and whether to have quoits or a volleyball court on the rear deck.
Sure, the brutal and disastrous Provisional IRA campaign is over. Peace of a kind is now an enduring condition in Northern Ireland. But the fundamental divisions between two different social, economic, political and religious cultures remain; and the defining condition of the heart of republican culture - that it has inherited the mantle, the duties and the armed traditions of the men of 1916 - is the anti-matter to the defining matter of loyalism, which is that it yields not an inch to armed republicanism.
Sinn Féins come and Sinn Féins go; but the vitality of a historically enduring Sinn Féin is that is unambiguously the political arm of the IRA. The present Sinn Féin can pull down the flag of paramilitarism, but the moment it does that, it is not true Sinn Féin, and another Sinn Féin, with an IRA attached, will haul up its banner on a parallel flagstaff. And in South Armagh, North Belfast, mid-Tyrone and South Derry, which flag will the republican communities be saluting?