The IRA's two authenticated moves on decommissioning prove anti-agreement unionists wrong twice, writes Steven King.
Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel once wrote that there are no coincidences in Jewish history. The same could be said of Irish history.
Rather, the terrifying Palestinian kamikaze attacks and the blundering Israeli response provided the IRA with the perfect backdrop for its long-overdue decommissioning announcement yesterday.
The Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, will have every reason to be grateful to the IRA for advancing the Northern Ireland peace process another stage just hours after he was pointing to it again in Texas as a model for the resolution of the Middle East conflict.
But the IRA's very welcome move also came just hours after the FARC narco-terrorists killed 12 people 45 miles from the Colombian capital, Bogota.
In an action reminiscent of the Provisional IRA's most deadly attack in Warrenpoint, an initial small explosion outside a nightclub drew police and soldiers to the scene where four minutes later a second massive explosion went off.
Can it really be a coincidence that the IRA announcement came on the eve of he US House of Representatives' International Relations Committee's hearings into the IRA's anti-American activities in the Colombian jungle?
The intended message was clear: whatever happens in Latin America, the IRA wants to be seen as being on the side of the angels.
The same message was being conveyed to the Irish electorate. We shall see how successful this IRA tactic proves.
In Northern Ireland, though, matters will be more complicated. The IRA has now taken two steps along a road that is now probably irreversible. David Trimble can point out that not only were anti-agreement unionists wrong when they said there would never be IRA decommissioning but they were wrong again when they said last October's event was a purely cynical one-off gesture in the wake of September 11th.
The bones of a process are emerging into view.
The basic foundation of the anti-agreement position - that the IRA campaign was not over - has been dealt a severe blow.
The strategic subtlety of Mr Trimble's infamous speech to his ruling council in March can now be appreciated. In the run-up to that meeting Mr Trimble was confronted by an unenviable dilemma.
On the one hand, he did not want to create another deadline over decommissioning for fear of upsetting a process that was, in his calculation, already in train. On the other, he had to satisfy sceptical sentiment within his party.
Rather than attempt to appeal to either competing pressure, he subtly created a diversion with his call for a Border poll so the electorate could choose between the status quo and a future joined to a Republic he compared very unfavourably with the UK.
What he said about decommissioning was lost in the resulting fuss.
But while yesterday's decommissioning announcement and the more important and more revealing confirmation from the de Chastelain Commission were to be savoured, life is not all plain sailing for moderate unionism.
The decommissioning of weapons with the capacity to cause massive loss of human life is suggestive of a republican leadership that wants to make a decisive break with its past.
The movement's addiction to the petty repression of nationalists and to subversion, though, leaves open a different interpretation.
Intelligence reports are now firmly linking the break-in at Castlereagh police station to the Provisionals. The possible consequences to the PSNI network of informers - the key to the security shield that protects Belfast, Dublin and London from carnage - are massive.
Faced with these conflicting signals from republicanism, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for moderate unionism to enjoy a period of political stability wherein the advantages of an inclusive devolved settlement can be made apparent to a suspicious unionist electorate.
The fear that IRA activity is inexorably driving the process to a predetermined all-Ireland outcome lingers still.
If a Border poll can settle unionist nerves and allow the power-sharing institutions the freedom to bed down free from abstractions about a united Ireland, then it deserves a better, less intemperate hearing from the Taoiseach.
Dr Steven King is political adviser to the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, Mr David Trimble.