The final battle has begun over the meaning of the Troubles. The "war" is over, but there remains the matter of settled interpretation. Dr Paisley last week restated his case: the IRA must disband before his party will resume powersharing with Sinn Féin. The Taoiseach baulked at the word "disbandment".
Instead, he reiterated, the IRA must cease all criminal and paramilitary activity and "become a commemorative organisation". He can't see why anybody "would force an organisation to do more than that". I'll tell you why: because by doing so, unionism can claim total and final victory over the IRA. If the IRA disbands, it will have been established that the IRA was not merely an illegal organisation but an unambiguously terrorist organisation. Since that is what Dr Paisley has always claimed, it is hard to see him now resiling from his long-stated position by agreeing to the commemorative idea. Commemorate what, from Dr Paisley's viewpoint? The murder of police officers and innocent civilians, with perhaps an annual pageant in memory of Brighton? Hardly.
Here we come again to the hard centre of irreconcilability that lies beyond the fudge. The IRA sees itself as a body of freedom fighters; Dr Paisley sees an evil band of bloodthirsty villains. Never the twain shall meet. The greatest strength and the core shortcoming of the Belfast Agreement was that it was achieved by evading the irreconcilabilities. The two governments imagined they were negotiating an end to a war, republicans thought they were getting an implicit apology from unionism, while unionists were accepting the unconditional surrender of the IRA. It is nothing short of miraculous that seven years of relative peace have flowed from this exercise in circumlocution.
The resurrected "test" set by Dr Paisley whereby he suggests that he would be prepared to go into government with Sinn Féin when Mr Ahern is prepared to "share power with the IRA", is his way of reiterating that there was never any exceptional context in Northern Ireland to justify the IRA in taking up arms, and therefore no "war" and no need for a "peace" agreement. By placing himself in a situation analogous to that of the Taoiseach, Dr Paisley again rejects the idea that "Ulster" was ever less democratic than the Republic. With this test, he rattles the ambiguities that remain in minds south of the Border about the legitimacy of the Provisionals' "armed struggle".
Likewise, the concept of a commemorative organisation is rooted in southern attitudes towards republican tradition that Dr Paisley seeks to satirise. To give the Taoiseach his due, his proposal is clearly another attempt at a creative fudge, aimed at giving the Provos a reason to get out of bed in the morning. But to allow the IRA to continue in such a guise would take at face value its claim to inherit the crusade for national self-realisation. For obvious reasons this is problematic for unionists, but it also poses problems for small "r" republicans down here.
The IRA is, after all, just one of several organisations claiming to inherit the Irish republican tradition, and its right to do so is by no means clear-cut or universally acknowledged. The most that might be conceded in this regard by those who consider themselves republicans in the broader sense is a right of the Provisionals to "commemorate" their involvement in the recent three decades of conflict in the North, the very thing that Dr Paisley is most determinedly against.
The ground has shifted considerably since Easter 1998. In the immediate aftermath of the agreement, fears that the IRA would go back to war put most of the pressure on unionists to deliver what they had signed up for. Much of the unionist machinations of the time looked like reckless gamesmanship, endangering the fragile peace. If the IRA had been less concerned with its organisational pride, it could have exploited that situation to its advantage, but the moment passed and now the outlook is vastly changed. There is no longer any substantial fear of a return to violent conflict, not least because, lacking an overwhelming moral context, the IRA's own supporters would not wear it.
Moreover, the Provos have been discredited by their response to the McCartney murder and the various episodes of criminality that have arisen, and so lack any public relations leverage with which to buttress any further refusals to disband. They can refuse to disband, of course, but they cannot anticipate that public opinion outside their own ghettoes will support them. Nor can they expect that Dr Paisley or others will suffer any significant public disapprobation for insisting on disbandment (not that this would worry Dr Paisley, in any event).
The worst that can occur, therefore, is a continuing stand-off. Dr Paisley has remained constant. The Provisionals hunker down to discuss their options.
The two governments again seek formulations and fudges by which to move the situation forward. Whoever blinks first, it will not be Dr Paisley. If there is a solution, it will almost certainly involve a total victory for him.