Wrong: totally and utterly wrong, wrong, wrong. It's an unsettling, disorienting thing finally to realise that the prediction about which I have written thousands of words turns out to have been complete rubbish. Many other questions are no doubt raised by the recent Stormont deal, and these might very well show that some of my predictions have been correct, but that is scarcely relevant. What is relevant is that what I said would never happen, a unionist-SDLP-Sinn Fein accord, has come to pass.
It is a fact; an undeniable and glorious fact, and I am gloriously, magnificently, totally wrong.
I was wrong not merely in my assessment of what Sinn Fein would do and how the Unionists would react to a proposed deal with a republican movement that is still awash with Semtex and Kalashnikovs, but also about the intentions and goals of the two main Sinn Fein leaders, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. They were in fact prepared to do what I was sure they would not or could not do - that is to settle for far less than the IRA began this war to achieve.
Brave and difficult
This was an exceedingly brave and difficult thing to do, and it would be contemptible not to give credit where it is due. Blessed indeed are the peacemakers, and even more blessed for persevering in the face of doubts and sneers from such as myself. Their place in history is assured, and for bringing us peace, they deserve that place.
But, as it would be wrong not to give credit to John Hume, and to those two men in particular, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, for managing with great patience and adroitness to bring the greater part of the republican movement round to their strategy of advance by peaceful means, so would it be wrong to forget what the IRA has been up to for the past 25 years.
No cause deserved or justified the feast of homicide and misery which the IRA and others placed on the table of the Irish and British peoples. I sense already a rewriting of history, as if an honourable cause has found a new and honourable means to an end. A comparable rewriting of history followed earlier passages of violence, and so fed an appetite for war, as if war had been a friend to Ireland and to the cause of independence.
The complete reverse has been the case. This is the bicentenary of the 1798 Rising, which is already been marked by some fairly brainless celebrations of a truly terrible time in our history.
The Easter Rising of 1916 was transformed by mythic rewriting into something noble and uplifting, though it caused appalling suffering to the plain and unconsulted people of Dublin and was an assault on democracy by a conspiracy within a conspiracy - and not one of those conspirators had ever bothered his head to present himself beforehand to the electorate.
Calamitous period
From 1916 emerged the wars of 1919 to 1923, which were littered with atrocious events of every description, and which brought low the names of Britain and of Ireland. Incredibly, that calamitous period was soon to find numerous apologists, and the cold-blooded murder of unarmed men before their wives came to be glamorised and romanticised.
One great and enduring truth emerged from all these episodes of homicide and communal violence: the cause which called for such deeds, such sacrifices, for ruined lives and for economic despoliation, was never advanced by them. Not an inch. I have written many times how little an advance the Treaty of 1921 was on the Home Rule Bill of 1914: only an investment of a lake of human blood before and after the Treaty conceals this central truth. Peaceful means, patiently and persuasively followed, could have achieved in 1919 or 1920 what murder and ruin brought about years later.
Violence failed; but those who ruled the new State had been men of violence, and history was rewritten and reconstructed to justify the failed and bankrupt means they had employed. The bloody fantasies of one generation fed the appetites of later generations and the virtues of violent conspiracy were exalted and honoured.
Murder upon murder
The dreary cycle of murder, of repression, of state and terrorist brutality, of organised stupidity masquerading as duty, began again even as the RUC was being disarmed and the civil rights programme was being implemented in 1970. Where do we even begin to tell this tale, of murder upon murder, massacre upon massacre, atrocity following upon atrocity, of screaming men being tortured to death and of young mothers being secretly buried by torch-light, until it seemed that Ireland alone in all of Europe was doomed to live in some perpetual dark age of moral primitivism and homicidal boastfulness? The tale is too terrible to tell; so terrible that a veil is already been drawn over the suspension of individual and corporate conscience which caused such wicked things to be done.
That is why now is the time not just to praise and thank the peacemakers, and I do, and to ask forgiveness for doubting them when the hour was darkest and they needed help, not derision; but it is also the time to remember the purposeless, idiotic war they both waged and ended. We will be doomed to relive this nightmare if we ignore or choose to forget the truly abominable nature of the events of the past 30 years.
Never again, dear God, never again.