That there should be an air of exhilaration about Sinn Fein in the aftermath of its electoral gains understandable. That it should cause its principal spokespersons to act and speak as if the rest of us have lost our critical faculties is not. Yet to listen to Mr Gerry Adams or Mr Martin McGuinness argue the reasons why they should now have unconditional access to the talks due to begin in a week is to hear fact described as fiction and hard, unyielding certainty as wishful thinking.
The talks begin on Monday next without Sinn Fein, unless in the interim the IRA reinstates its ceasefire. That has been the clear position of the two governments. It has been the very basis upon which the electoral process took place, indeed, it is woven into the enabling legislation. There will not be and there must not be a yielding on this.
Only the very naive or the very desperate will not recognise the game of blackmail and bluff which is now being played by the Sinn Fein/IRA axis. There has been compromise and yielding to accommodate them at every turn, right down to the further softening on decommissioning this weekend by Sir Patrick Mayhew.
Now, all that remains is one issue - whether Sinn Fein will have the right to come into the processes of negotiation to achieve a new settlement while its brothers in arms, with bombs and guns await the availability of suitable targets and propitious circumstances to continue their violent work outside.
This is the ne plus ultra; the line beyond which they cannot be allowed to go. If the cost of holding this line is a failure of the process at this time and a return, to the extensive security measures of previous years, so be it. Nobody must be allowed the pretence of representing a democratic mandate while their position is supported by a private army, ready to go on the offensive if the talks process proves unsatisfactory to its ambitions.
Yesterday Mr McGuinness argued that matters still rest where they were in 1968 - that the issue is one person one vote. But the reality is that a vote for Sinn Fein still represents a different purchase than a vote for anyone else. It buys a stroke on a ballot paper but it also buys the killing power of an Armalite. Every child on the streets knows that Sinn Fein and the IRA are part of the one, woven tapestry.
Only a democracy that placed neither value nor respect upon itself would admit into its processes those who want to retain the fall back option of murder. The intervention by Mr Albert Reynolds, arguing for a fudge which would allow Sinn Fein to enter the talks with a commitment to seeking an IRA ceasefire, might charitably be described as well meaning but misplaced. More objectively, it reflects a dangerous willingness to yield where no democratically committed representative should do so least of all a former Taoiseach.