Now, as the peace process lies in ruins, are we to return to a dark night of war? And if we are, will we once again elevate in law the principles of political aspiration over those of morality? The celebration of politics over humanity was the besetting sin of the 20th century, embodied most of all in the rival totalitarianisms of communism and fascism, but in the Irish nationalist credo also. In all three, the political motive for a deed, rather than the deed itself, became the legal criterion by which the law should judge it. In this morally dislocated world, a truly atrocious act became immune from legal consequence because the motive was judged to be political: "political" itself sanctified, uplifted and absolved.
Legally condoned
So acts which would otherwise be beyond the pale of law or civilisation became ethically contextualised and legally condoned. In the past 30 years, this State has created a formidable body of case law which has protected the "politically-motivated" from the consequences of deeds perpetrated outside the jurisdiction of Irish courts. Apart from the McGlinchey extradition, no court that I remember has seriously tried to analyse the terminology involved: no court has dissected motivation beyond the bland, simplistic and ultimately all-absolving decree resulting from an offence being declared "political".
Take, say, the case of four unarmed young men who have gone out partying, who have been seized at gunpoint, made to lie down on a bed, and had their brains blown out. This is a truly horrible and evil deed. Perform that same act in the name of "politics, and its alleged authors are miraculously no longer amenable to the due processes of law. This is not a hypothetical case but an actual one. The High Court ruling which followed this foul and evil deed underlaid many of the subsequent judgements in other - and on occasion higher - courts.
The four young men were off-duty British soldiers who were repeatedly befriended by some young women at the Woodlands Hotel in Lisburn over several nights in March 1973. Finally, the women invited the soldiers to a party in a Belfast flat; once there, the men sat and down and started drinking. The women left, and two gunmen entered. They made the soldiers lie on a bed, and then shot them through the back of the head. Three of the soldiers were killed. The fourth survived, but with permanent injuries to his brain, spine and tongue.
The wicked young women who knew and befriended these men, who laughed and joked with them and then led them to their doom are now middle-aged; what demons haunt them in the midnight watches? Truly dreadful ones, I trust. With worse to come, I trust even more.
Arrested
The RUC sought a local woman, who was arrested in the Republic two months later. Twenty five years ago last December, she appeared before the High Court and Mr Justice Finlay, to face extradition to the North. She did not give evidence. Her husband did, sparsely.
Although Detective Inspector Albert Matchett, seeking the extradition, told the court that no organisation had claimed responsibility for the murder, and no direct evidence was presented to the court that it was actually politically motivated, Mr Justice Finlay ruled that there could be no doubt that even such a dastardly murder as this one, if carried out with the intent to overthrow the government of a country by force, was a political offence.
He then ruled that as a matter of probability the offence was political and refused to affirm the order for extradition. The State, to its enduring shame, did not appeal to a higher court.
Mr Justice Finlay was presumably right in law - who I am to say? - but you don't have to be exquisitely sensitive to find such rulings disturbing. They elevate the political deed beyond both the rule of ordinary law and the sacredness of human life. Four young men became of no account before an Irish court because the murder and ruination visited on them were authorised by the holy grail of a constitutional imperative towards a united Ireland. They, their lives, and their bodily integrity were as beyond law as were the untermenschen of the Third Reich or the tottering skeletons of the gulag.
Supreme Court
Worse was to come. The Supreme Court, in one of the darkest juris-prudential nadirs any democracy has ever known, actually defined the means by which terrorists could murder in another jurisdiction and escape extradition. Of course, their lordships ruled upon the law as they found it, in statute and precedent - and naturally, without nationalist prejudice of any kind; but our political establishment then did nothing whatever to change that law. Armed with a pistol - and no doubt knowing their lordships' definitions of a political offence - the INLA murdered Sergeant Michael Newman in Derby. His alleged killers then managed to defeat extradition warrants because the actual killers had conformed with Supreme Court rules.
Who can say what is possible within the law now that Articles 2 and 3 are gone? Who can say what the IRA will do within the ruins of this peace process? Maybe they will do their best to revive it. Let us hope so. But might all democrats not now all agree on the primacy of human life over "political" imperatives?
If we get nothing else from this peace process, that at least would be a jewel worth cherishing.