Duncan Shipley Dalton is an Ulster Unionist member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for South Antrim. He is also a former member of the British army, having served in Belfast with the Royal Irish Regiment. On Wednesday night last he went to a public meeting of Feile an Phobail in St Louise's comprehensive school on the Andersonstown Road, in west Belfast, to speak at a questions-and-answers session attended by up to 600 people in a packed hall. He was a major hit.
He spoke of how he wanted republicans to be part of the Northern Ireland Executive, of how he accepted the bona fides of Sinn Fein and the IRA in wanting peace, of how the decommissioning issue had assumed unreal proportions or how badly the Catholic population had been treated in the days of the old Stormont.
He stood his ground on what he saw as "the necessity" to have plastic bullets available in riot situations to protect the lives of members of the security forces and, although the audience disagreed, he stood his ground impressively. Afterwards he went with other panellists and organisers of the feile to a rock music event in a marquee on the Falls Road. He was greeted hospitably and warmly by everyone he met. And yet at the end of the night he was depressed.
He was depressed because of an exchange with another panellist, the newly elected Sinn Fein MP for Fermanagh South Tyrone, Ms Michelle Gildernew. She was asked a simple question: Did she believe that as far as the IRA was concerned the war was over? In answering, she equivocated. The familiar Sinn Fein equivocation in the familiar Sinn Fein-speak - the guns being now silent, the need to progress on the Good Friday agreement and to move to a united Ireland, that the war was over "for now" because the political road was perceived as the way to go.
Pressed again on the issue, she dug deeper: who knows what is going to happen in 10 years? If the political path is blocked, then it would be arrogant for her to say that there would not be a resort to violence again. Duncan Shipley Dalton wondered whether he had been naive in believing that the war was over.
He was depressed also because of a perceived obstinacy on the part of the audience, an unwillingness to accord any validity to unionist apprehensions about the involvement of Sinn Fein in government, about unionist concerns over decommissioning and the changes to the police force.
When the audience was asked at one point if there was anyone in favour of a start to IRA decommissioning, there was a resounding "no" from the hall.
What is depressing about Ms Gildernew's response on the war issue is not that it hints at a strategy that if the "unarmed struggle" doesn't work there will be a reversion to the "armed struggle" (the reality is, whether they intended it or not, republicans no longer have the option to return to the "armed struggle" and, in any event, the "unarmed struggle" is achieving very much more than the "armed" one ever did.)
No, it's a different reason. It is that republicans don't seem to appreciate that the unionist community needs to be told in unequivocal terms again and again that the war is over as far as the IRA is concerned.
In the current issue of An Phoblacht there is a list of sectarian attacks by loyalists on Catholic areas since the beginning of the year. In July alone there were 28 bomb attacks by loyalists on Catholic homes. There were two murders - one of Ciaran Cummings in Antrim and the other of Gavin Brett, in north Belfast (the latter was mistaken for a Catholic.) There were several other murder attempts on Catholics and several Catholic families were driven from their homes. Since the beginning of the year, according to An Phoblacht, there were 220 loyalist attacks on Catholics and Catholic areas.
These included 75 bombings and 20 gun attacks. (That one has to rely on An Phoblacht is perhaps a reflection of the indifference of the mainstream media to the predicament of northern nationalists.)
To say the least, this diminishes the pressure on the IRA to decommission. At the meeting last Wednesday, speaker after speaker referred to the intensification of loyalist attacks and the determination not to have Catholic areas defenceless as they were in 1969 (this does not of course explain why there is a refusal to decommission Semtex.)
There was also indignation over what was perceived as the indiscriminate use of plastic bullets by the RUC during a riot following an Orange march in July. (In the audience on Wednesday night was Ms Emma Groves, the elderly woman who lost her sight when a plastic bullet was shot into her face as she opened her kitchen window in the mid 1970s.)
Decommissioning is seen as surrendering the defence of Catholic areas, at a time of great apprehension, to a police force whose enduring character was made vivid by its recent use of a control mechanism that is regarded as too barbaric for use in the "mainland".
Whatever deal may be cooked up by the politicians to rescue the Good Friday agreement, the people of Northern Ireland seem unready for that reconciliation that alone would underpin a political settlement.