Down, down, down: the civic and political corruption resulting from the degrading contract that is the peace process searches ever lower to find the nadir, past which every further concession is unacceptable; but it has not found it yet.
And after the police raid on the house of the journalists Liam Clarke and his wife Kathryn Johnston, after the looting of their files, after their arrest and interrogation over a 24-hour period, after the battering-ram foray by police into the offices of The Sunday Times and the seizure of more files, and after the deafening silence which has followed, I am not sure that there is any nadir.
For it seems that almost anything is tolerable to spare the intactness of the peace process - even an assault on the home and the persons of two of the bravest journalists in Northern Ireland, an intrusion which is quite unprecedented in any Western European democracy since the end of the second World War. And the outcome? Silence. The silence is more unnerving than the raid, though that in itself was deeply troubling.
The implication of that silence is that there was nothing wrong with the raid, when there was in fact everything wrong with it. Journalists cannot function in any society, never mind one in perpetual conflict, if the information they gather can be stolen for use by the state. They cannot function if they live in fear of the raid on their homes, and of being dragged off to an interrogation centre because what they had printed conflicted with the political interests of a government and its terrorist allies.
And they are allies, though they have their differences still; and were it not for the inconvenience of having to submit to the authority of the electorate, no doubt those differences would have long since been glossed over. The truth is that both the British and Irish governments are allies of the IRA in this peace process.
How to judge an alliance? By invitations. Who regularly gets invited to Downing Street: the IRA or the victims of the IRA? Who meets regularly with whom about a common project: the governments of Ireland and Britain and the victims of IRA terrorism, or the governments and the IRA? The British government was clearly embarrassed that Liam Clarke had transcripts of tapped telephone conversations between Martin McGuinness on the one hand, and Mo Mowlam and Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff, on the other. But leaks are commonplace in political life. What is unprecedented about these leaks was the response: the arrest of the pair who had made them public, and the seizure of vast amounts of documents and computer discs both from their home and their office.
Just to illuminate the agenda at work in this raid, the police were offered the keys to the Sunday Times offices; instead, they chose to use a battering ram to smash the doors down. Had the old RUC done this there would have been political uproar.
And had the target of a comparable police raid been Sinn Féin, the Government here would have been hopping and the Shinners would have been mumbling about the ceasefire being in jeopardy. Remember Stormont last year? But when two journalists get turned over there is virtually total silence, though the implications are immense and sinister. A third journalist, Henry McDonald, was called to account for himself to the police in Belfast on Wednesday. The message is clear: print secrets which we in government don't like, and your homes could be raided, you could be arrested and held for 24 hours, and your office doors could be smashed down.
In other words, anti-terrorist legislation and anti-terrorist practices are being used to harass journalists who have the temerity to print details of phone calls between Martin McGuinness, a member of the IRA army council, and the British government.
This is grotesque and outrageous, but in all truth merely an example of how states behave if popular opinion permits them to.
But, corrupted, deluded and debased by the endless moral compromises of the peace process, "popular opinion" on anything not immediately within the confines of the peace process no longer exists. The Belfast Agreement achieved the authorisation of the people of Ireland five years ago; and anything to ensure the Agreement
goes through
will now suffice.
Thus the civil liberties of those maimed and bereaved by the IRA, and who still seek justice, or the liberty of journalists to discover and disclose - these are abandoned as governments indulge the grisly habit of propitiating terrorists who still decline to say the war is over, and who were rearming themselves even while in government in Northern Ireland.
We passed a new threshold last week, when the institutions of the state were used to coerce complicity of the press around the unprincipled tenets and the ruinous compromises which lie at the heart of the peace process. We long since learnt that the victims of the Troubles could be forgotten; we now know that the right and duty to tell the truth could be burnt as a sacrifice upon the altar of appeasement.
So: where does it stop? The answer apparently is: it won't. It will continue until government and terrorist are bound like worms in a mucose and amoral union of interest: and the only enemy remaining will be a diminishing band of critics as the "peace process" continues its descent into a ruthless orthodoxy of intimidation, derision and ostracism.