In the present discussion about photographs of scrapped weapons, the dominant perception is of a clash of egos - Dr Paisley's versus the IRA's. But, while Dr Paisley sure wields a considerable ego, it is matched by a formidable intelligence, and it is difficult to conceive of an army, even an illegal one, being hamstrung by mere pride.
It was not pique that caused Dr Paisley to demand that the IRA parade itself in sackcloth and ashes and link this to a demand for photographic evidence. Nor was it out of vanity that the IRA refused. The idea that the IRA might have provided such photographs anyway had the doctor kept his mouth shut is as implausible as the idea of Dr Paisley keeping his mouth shut. There is much more at play - principally the issue of criminality, though not in the narrow sense the PDs cynically seek to raise now. Even "moderate" unionists, who acknowledge the abuses of the old Stormont regime, reject suggestions that the IRA's "war" was necessary. The word "war", when used by unionists, comes swaddled in quotation marks. And the more that normality asserts itself, the more valid those quotes appear.
The primary engine of change in the North was neither violence nor politics, but shifting understandings in a media-saturated world. Whatever context seemed to lend legitimacy to the IRA's "armed struggle" had evaporated long before the ceasefires, due to media-generated perceptions that the IRA was the primary problem. A complicating pathos was provided by the sense growing in parallel that the same media scrutiny would willy nilly have made untenable the unionist hegemony and its abuses. Even if no progress had been made until, say, Mrs Thatcher left office, we would now be at least as advanced as we are had a shot never been fired. There is, therefore, a degree of - albeit retrospective and somewhat perverse - incontrovertibility to unionist insistence that the IRA was/is simply a terrorist organisation with unilateral responsibility for much avoidable pain.
To talk the IRA down from the ledge of its own extremism, however, the peace process was bedded in the idea that it was the negotiated end to a war. And the clearest message of that process has been that the biggest obstacle to peace was the hurt generated not by the original bones of contention but the tit-for-tat conflict that gradually obscured its own beginnings. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the North is that the most insurmountable of its disputes are no longer about the "root causes" but about the bloodshed that occurred because these were not tackled in time.
History may decide that wholesale bad leadership dragged everyone into an avoidable conflict. But what would the many innocents who were violently obliterated have to say if they knew that what divided the sides at the end was not the substance of fundamental differences, but how those violent obliterations should be described? The IRA, comprehensibly, refuses to accept the "terror" label, and certainly has a point in arguing that this was not part of the original deal. The two governments hosted a process defined not as the cessation of criminal activity but as "conflict resolution". Many unionists rejected this concept but acquiesced in a pragmatic fudge. Others, notably the DUP, refused on either basis. Whatever history may decide about Dr Paisley, he cannot be accused of fudge. He says now what he has always said: "We will not deal with terrorists unless they repent." For him, the peace process was and is about pulling IRA teeth. The fudgers have exited; Dr Paisley holds the stage.
The IRA claims to have gone "further for peace" than anyone, and has arguably ceded even more than its own logic seemed to permit. In agreeing to decommission, it has implicitly accepted that what is required is not merely the standing down of "armed struggle", but the termination of, let's say, an inappropriate use of arms. Reciprocal concepts such as "demilitarisation" have gone some way to disguising this, but the IRA's actions have all but acknowledged that its physical force strategy was the main obstacle to a settlement.
And now, since little more than semantics divides Dr Paisley from the IRA, the IRA stands to lose little more by giving him what he demands. If republicans can be humiliated by photographs of their "acts of completion", the humiliation is implicit in the nature, rather than photographic representation of the completion.
The question is, as always: is the prize worth the pain? Smart republicans know the political logic of decommissioning relates not to unionist demands but the unfeasibility of armed struggle in a wholly altered situation. You cannot win a war declared by one side only, and you cannot win the peace until the war is called off. Dr Paisley has won the war of perception and now demands a price for uttering the words "Sinn Féin" without the withering addendum, "/IRA".
What he demands is the final denouement, by his script, in a drama in which he, all but uniquely, has maintained character integrity to the end.