There is a belief now that nothing will break the Northern stalemate in the foreseeable future, but one development is plain. Where now the consensus on which the peace process was so painfully constructed, asks Fionnuala O Connor
There is a belief now that nothing will break the Northern stalemate in the foreseeable future, but one development is plain. Where now the consensus on which the peace process was so painfully constructed?
The broad platform on which stood with varying degrees of unease the Taoiseach of the day, the leader of the SDLP, and the leader of Sinn Féin, political wing of the IRA - pan-nationalism, as unionists angrily decried it - has vanished as though it never existed.
In its place there is anger, spite and recrimination, and that's only from Gerry Adams and assorted underlings towards the Government. Bertie Ahern and Michael McDowell trash Sinn Féin repeatedly, in the Dáil and out. Mark Durkan has been snappish about the republican leadership, decidedly peeved about Dublin's drift.
This week's much-heralded analysis of paramilitary bad behaviour and recommendation of sanctions against Sinn Féin and the UVF-linked Progressive Unionists brought old ambivalence to the surface.
The broad front was united not on any definition of Irish political identity, but by the need to sustain negotiations. The debate about nationalism did not happen, and to a very large extent, John Hume's personal standing in the Republic carried the day.
Decades of hard-worked contacts with successive taoisigh and senior civil servants paid off: the clincher was Hume's popularity with an electorate that never had a chance to vote for him except in polls. Today's unease at the emergence of Gerry Adams as a highly-rated party leader echoes the annoyance in some quarters when Hume won popularity contests as most trusted Irish politician.
Hume, Gerry Adams, and at different moments Albert Reynolds, John Bruton, and Dick Spring constructed and maintained an alliance that concealed a multitude of inter-personal and inter-party tensions. The overriding concern was to stop the violence by showing republicans that politics could deliver.
Mr Bruton as Taoiseach, often visibly holding his nose, stood by Sinn Féin over a period in which the IRA killed 17 people.
When Liz O'Donnell recalled last Monday that the Sinn Féin leadership reviled by her party colleague the Minister for Justice were once negotiating partners in good faith, she invoked a different political climate. The woman who brought a breath of glamour to tedious Belfast meetings and then rose above her image and her junior status when she maintained a well-briefed position in place of the transient Ray Burke, had the gumption to speak out against a trend.
She obviously believes republicans have had years to rid themselves of militaristic posturing like targeting and surveillance, the brutality of beatings and shootings, the profiteering of smuggled diesel, stolen cigarettes, pirated CDs. But her point was that sanctions don't constitute a political policy, without parallel work to bring Sinn Féin that last vital step into supporting policing - which in itself would mothball the IRA.
Clearly, Sinn Féin thinks that as far as its vote is concerned it can forever insist that it alone is blameless. Republicanism has always been self-righteous: their vote is now their vindication. Leading figures voice outrage at the proposals effectively to fine the party for IRA activity. In fact, the penalties are pain-free. Sinn Féin has cash to spare, and what republican voters will see is a spotlight on IRA violence rather than the numerous sins of loyalists.
From a republican viewpoint, those who stand in judgment are not above reproach; the British stalling on inquiries recommended by the judge they appointed, the Irish Government's main concern to reverse Sinn Féin's success in the polls. The question is how far these perceptions are shared, North and South, beyond the present support for Sinn Féin.
In the early 1990s in a book on Northern Catholic identity, I looked at attitudes highly coloured by the violence of the day and the prospects of it ending. People were deterred from voting Sinn Féin by IRA killing, so they voted SDLP but feared it would ask too little of unionists and Britain. They knew the Republic was increasingly alienated from the troubled North, were unsighted about the future but adamant it should not be the sealed Northern Ireland of unionist dreams. A minor republican apparatchik suggested recently that a similar study today would be bound to find different attitudes. He made no guesses about the difference.
The Adams-McGuinness leadership is chastised for insufficient discipline over the IRA. They can shrug off the electoral effects, but for them too the IRA is unfinished business. They have taken their people into strange territory, none stranger than the Stormont they remade by their presence, echoing now as politics hesitates, the pulse of electoral success the only sign of life. Do they hope to recreate that pan-nationalist platform, or think they have replaced it with their own success?