Despite the seeming change of emphasis from both London and Dublin, the priority of both governments remains finding a way of satisfying unionist demands, and last weekend's events will ensure that this objective becomes even more central. The Taoiseach's recent statement in Australia that the way forward may be through seeking a declaration from the IRA that "war" is not an option was just a different encapsulation of the unionist requirement for total victory and exculpation. Similarly, the question voiced almost simultaneously by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen: "Are arms going to be put beyond use in a post-conflict situation?"
Leaving aside, for a minute, the profound implications of the inverted commas placed around the word "war" in reports of the Taoiseach's remarks, it is unclear from Mr Ahern's phraseology what precisely he was looking for. Did he mean the IRA should state, in the context of developments in the peace process, that war is no longer the centrepiece of republican strategy? If so, I would have thought that this point had already been passed. On the other hand, if he was seeking some kind of philosophical retraction of the Armalite strategy, I think he knows as well as I do that he was wasting his breath.
The answer to Mr Cowen's question, quite obviously, is, "yes . . . but." The but relates to whether we are yet, in fact, in a "post-conflict situation", and this is not something the IRA can decide unilaterally. It strikes me also that, if we were in a post-conflict situation, conflict resolution would be unnecessary.
In truth, such formulas are either superfluous or absurd. The IRA has been on ceasefire for six years: war, or even "war", has not been an "option" during that time. Whether war becomes an option in the future will, I imagine, depend on republican perceptions of how things are progressing. From its own perspective, it would be unwise for the IRA to say that war should never again be an option, not least because this would create a cloud of doubt around the question of whether armed struggle was necessary in the first place.
This is all too reminiscent of the immediate aftermath of the 1994 ceasefire, when public conversation was monopolised by demands about whether the ceasefire was "permanent" and whether there was a difference between permanent and complete. Of course, the point of these questions is not to get the IRA to state more coherently that which is already quite clear, but to deal with the issue of progress within the unionist paradigm. Because of David Trimble's supposed delicate position, the UUP has been allowed to drive the process for two years, so that every initiative is at some level an attempt to give Mr Trimble what he wants. It is unionists who insist on impossible declarations from the IRA, and the reason they insist upon them is that they know they are impossible. If they thought the IRA would hand over guns, they would drop this demand forthwith.
I imagine that the IRA would have no difficulty saying that the war is over, provided two conditions were met: (1) that the war was, in fact, over; and (2) that there was a widespread acknowledgment that a war had actually taken place. Here we re-enter the semantic loop which has bedevilled the process for two years.
This difference between republicans and unionists as to whether or not the 30-year conflict constituted a war means very little to anybody else, but everything to the two parties concerned. The two governments clearly do not much care how the conflict is described. The people of the North, the Republic and Britain would agree to any description if the conflict could be brought to an end. Nonetheless, the tussle between unionism and republicanism about the true meaning of the conflict, which was at the heart of the decommissioning issue, is anything but semantic. For the IRA to acknowledge the validity of decommissioning would be to concede that its guns were criminally held, rather than the weaponry of a military faction engaged in war. On the other hand, unionists insist upon decommissioning because this is essential to their denial that there ever was a context for violent resistance.
To summarise what has frustrated the process for two years, one could hardly do much better than to say that unionists retrospectively sought to pretend the Belfast Agreement was not a two-way peace settlement, but the negotiated end to a terrorist campaign, whereas republicans sought to resist this analysis. Practically everybody apart from republicans adopted the unionist perspective, which goes to explain the ubiquitous inverted commas around the word war and the incessant attempts to obtain some formula of words from the IRA which could be presented to unionists as an admission of republican guilt.
Calls on the IRA to say the war is over have occurred in a disingenuous context in which no acknowledgment of the war was present in the first place. Even though British governments have for many years been engaging in talks with the IRA, there has never been any formal acknowledgment of a war, still less that it had any moral basis.
Although the British have themselves seemed more prepared to concede on this point, they have refused to do so explicitly, out of deference to the unionist agenda. Thus, although the peace process, with its prisoner releases and other hallmarks of conflict resolution, seemed to accept that what was occurring was an attempt to bring a war to an end, there remained a double-think which allowed the unionist version to dominate official thinking and public perceptions of what was occurring. The aim was to ensure that the uppermost question in the public mind was not a neutral "Is the war over?" but the unionist-driven "Has the IRA stopped its murder campaign?"
What is needed is a return to the assumptions which made possible the agreement of Good Friday 1998. This means, firstly, for unionists and the British government to acknowledge that there was, in fact, a war, and, secondly, for the IRA to say that, as far as it is concerned, and all things being equal, that war is now over. Such an exchange would implicitly accept that the IRA would hold on to its weapons until there was no possibility they would be needed again. But it would also make clear that such weapons would never again be used without extreme cause.
jwaters@irish-times.ie