There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries. We have before us, as we have behind us, shallows and miseries aplenty; yet there is the thrill of rising waters along the keel. Even as the Good Friday Agreement looks as if it might drift onto a rocky and unyielding shore, a saving tide remains at hand.
That tide is Flood, that tide is Ulster rugby, that tide is a poor broken body near the Border, that tide is Moriarty, that tide is a North Belfast Catholic in Aras an Uachtarain, that tide is Irish soldiers side by side on Messines Ridge, that tide is the politics of Charles J. Haughey vanishing in ignominy. We are in a flux unique since 1919; with wit and courage we can ride that flux to a new heights of peace and plenty.
Clear water
But we do need courage to place clear water between democrats - including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness with their powerful local mandates within Northern Ireland - and the cruel and evil men who murdered Eamon Collins. His death reeked of the wanton stench of the Shankill Butchers; and aside from its nihilistic savagery, it bore a message. It was: What need have we of guns? We can kill with blade and club. We are ineducable barbarians, chortling over our drinks at midnight while we remember the trembling lines of men we have slain, while we recall the hooded and whimpering figures pleading for life even as we drew the hammer back on our Ruger Blackhawks.
Such primitives are as much the enemy of Gerry Adams as they are of David Trimble, and no settlement will bring them in from their moral wilderness. All paramilitary leaders who have made the journey from the bullet to the ballot this century, from de Valera to Sean MacBride to Proinsias de Rossa, have discovered that some hard men have to be left behind, cackling like mad misers over their hoard of guns. As it was, so it is.
But even amid old lessons, there are new ones in the new and unfamiliar seas in which we find ourselves. The vile and unprincipled fix-it politics of the past are now discredited beyond repair in the newly emerging politics of openness of this Republic. And just as Eamon Collins was indeed a renegade, we must all be renegades now. Gerry Adams has reneged and is now prepared to help administer the state he once tried to overthrow. David Trimble, who once stood to attention under the Ulster Vanguard flag while Bill Craig declared it was time to exterminate the enemies of Ulster, has also reneged and has accepted in principle that he will share power with those who were once to be exterminated.
Ulster identity
Those of us fortunate enough to be at Lansdowne Road last Saturday inhaled a heady celebration of Ulster identity, distinct yet welcome, even though it was marked by the very emblem which came to prominence at those extermination rallies 27 years ago. It was an extraordinary sight, the once dreaded Vanguard flags filling the streets of Dublin while smiling gardai looked on. Nobody felt threatened by this declaration of Ulsterness, for this is a force we must do business with; but we can do no business with the men who killed Eamon Collins.
Those men will not decommission their weapons, be they Blackhawks, Semtex or kitchen knives. Only a wishful idiot thinks such creatures will voluntarily disarm. But what historical process requires Sinn Fein to remained organically linked to these people? Everything we have learned through this century tells us one thing, urgently and irrefutably: those who wish to govern must depart from those with the gun. Just as no armed group has disarmed, nobody connected with a private army has been given access to political power. That is the sine qua non of participation in political life in this island; it is the pre-Mitchell Mitchell principle.
IRA rump
In other words, it comes to this: the split. It is not possible to bring the Real or Continuity IRAs into the peace process. It is not possible to bring the unregenerate rump of gun-worshipping tribal atavists within the Provisional IRA into a disarmed accord with unionism. So be it. Let Sinn Fein leave them behind. If you like, renege; as in conscience we must all renege on positions we once held. Sinn Fein, when it has declared itself free and separate from the IRA, when it no longer elects members of the IRA Army Council, when it no longer mumbles its pornographic war news, will logically have fulfilled any decommissioning expectations.
This will not be easy, either for Sinn Fein to do, or for David Trimble to accept. Unionists think there will be guns in piles. There won't be. Nor will there be an easy way for the Sinn Fein-IRA family to accept that it is time for the democrats within that family now grown to adulthood to leave the dismal shallows of armed conspiracy, once and for all. There is indeed a tide in the affairs of men; such tides soon depart, and may not return in many a lifetime.