Today's Sinn Féin leadership faces the same problem de Valera did in 1927: the IRA has to go away, by standing down or being divorced, writes Jim Duffy
The crime rocked Ireland. Physical-force republicanism had been on ceasefire. Republican leaders had been painstakingly moving into democratic politics.
But when news of the crime broke, all the old doubts returned. Was the republican ceasefire over? Could republicans really be trusted? Ballot-box republicans found their careful step-by-step strategy thrown into chaos. All sides were united in asking one question: what happens now?
It may all sound like a description of the current crisis facing Irish republicanism. But, in fact, it describes an earlier crisis: the assassination of senior Free State minister Kevin O'Higgins in 1927.
The republican leader whose political strategy had been thrown into chaos was Éamon de Valera.
As with Gerry Adams more recently, de Valera had followed a careful step-by-step policy of moving away from physical-force republicanism for a number of years. By the mid-1920s he had regained political control of anti-treaty Sinn Féin from the militants, but he became increasingly frustrated at its refusal to stop daydreaming about its deceased Irish Republic and deal with political realities.
When he failed to convince the less politically astute in the party to adopt the realities and work to take power by ballots, not bullets, he and a group of brilliant individuals such as Seán Lemass, Frank Aiken and Seán T. O'Kelly left Sinn Féin altogether and set up a new pragmatic party, Fianna Fáil.
The problem was that participation in Free State democracy involved accepting Free State constitutional symbols, notably the oath of allegiance.
Unfortunately for de Valera, he and other republican leaders had spent years spinning the oath to be something it was not: an oath of allegiance to the British monarch.
Its wording showed that it actually was an oath of allegiance to the Free State. All it promised to the king was a meaningless fidelity.
And the words made clear that it was not to the British king at all, but to a different constitutional entity, the "king in Ireland". That misrepresentation in 1922 left de Valera with a problem in 1926.
To enter the Dáil (the obvious goal of a political party), they would have to take the oath, and thus, in the eyes of fundamentalist republicans, betray republicanism. So de Valera played a clever political game to keep republicans happy.
First, he sought to delete the oath from the constitution, a clever but meaningless stunt. As it was also in the treaty, at that stage unrepealable, it would still have to be taken by TDs even if removed from the constitution.
The Statute of Westminster later changed this. When this stunt was blocked by the government, a court case against the oath in the names of Lemass and O'Kelly was begun.
Tactically, de Valera was building up to the point where he could say to republicans: "Look, lads, we have done all we can to get rid of the oath, but we are going to have to take it to get into the Dáil and get power."
But the O'Higgins assassination changed everything.
Fianna Fáil had nothing to do with the murder. But many voters struggled to differentiate between Sinn Féin and the new Fianna Fáil, which was led by the man who had embodied anti-treaty republicanism and was populated by ex-Sinn Féiners and ex-IRA men.
W.T. Cosgrave's government seized the moment. A legal change forced an end to de Valera's word games by threatening all those TDs who failed to take the oath with the automatic loss of their seats.
Faced with seeing his party stripped of its TDs, de Valera followed the long-term logic of his political strategy and took the oath, although with jesuitical brilliance he insisted that he was simply signing a piece of paper to get into the Dáil which simply happened to have the oath written on it.
In the ultimate twist, an assassination which seemed to spell potential disaster produced a solution that bedded down Irish democracy. All mainstream Irish parties were now committed to parliamentary democracy. Change could only come through law and politics, not bombs and guns.
Cosgrave's blunt ultimatum to de Valera gave de Valera the excuse to do what the logic of his political strategy was going to see him do at some later stage anyway.
Today's Sinn Féin leadership faces the same problem as de Valera did in 1927.
The inescapable logic of its political strategy is obvious: the IRA has to go away, whether by standing down or being divorced. Like de Valera, it has been playing subtle games with symbols and language, as if waiting patiently for that inescapable logic to eventually dawn on its own movement.
And, as in 1927, a sudden shocking crime has pushed the patience of the rest of the community to breaking point.
De Valera was enabled in 1927, which produced both the crisis and the solution, to stop tiptoeing around his eventual goal and go for it. The crises of 2005, if handled correctly, could offer the same potential.
So will the leaders of Sinn Féin seize the moment to tell the IRA bluntly that its days are over? Will Bertie Ahern, like Cosgrave, use the moment to force political republicans to make the final big move they have been building up to anyway?
Whether the crises will lead to the Belfast Agreement's final definitive breakthrough or ultimate irretrievable breakdown may well depend on the answer to both questions and the skills of Adams and Ahern.