The Northern peace process and the development of Irish democracy need Sinn Féin - but the party and the IRA must now go their separate ways, writes Tim Pat Coogan.
Recent events have created a new political reality. Within a few short weeks Sinn Féin's links with the IRA have created an image of the party advancing on power with the writings of Pádraig Pearse in one hand and a picture of Tony Soprano in the other.
The republican movement preserved unity until the Belfast Agreement by using the "ballot box and Armalite" formula. The peace dividend, combined with Sinn Féin's hard work and political skills, subsequently overcame the split (from the "Real IRA") and brought the party great electoral rewards, with more seemingly certain to follow.
But almost overnight a gut-wrenching choice, which was being talked about anyhow, has suddenly become a political imperative for holding on to its gains. With renewed violence ruled out, the republican movement now has two realistic choices:
Either the IRA acknowledges that the war is over, that the situation has moved on, and stands down of its own volition.
Or Sinn Féin acknowledges that remaining linked with the IRA means having its image destroyed by the resultant mud (and blood) splashes, and instead publicly breaks with it while continuing to attempt to achieve republican goals by demonstrably, unassailably, constitutional methods.
My preference would be for the first option, which would lessen tensions and enable the IRA and its supporters who have lost loved ones to preserve some dignity and respect.
For the force-versus-political-action debate is the oldest and most agonising in the history of this State. The State itself was mid-wifed from it, and the debate resulted in the foundation of Cumann na nGaedheal, Fianna Fáil, Clann na Poblachta, Sinn Féin, the Workers' Party and Democratic Left.
All these parties eventually came to a point when it had to be recognised that the price of maintaining unity within the republican family meant, in effect, that the political leadership of the constitutionalists had responsibility without authority. It is Sinn Féin's karma that it, too, must now face that reality.
The current situation is bad enough for Sinn Féin in the light of the Northern Bank robbery, the murder of Robert McCartney and the issuing of the IRA statement which proclaimed that an organisation, supposedly observing a ceasefire, was ready, willing and able to kill people.
But even in the wake of this, some republican apologists still defiantly use defensive arguments which, while they may resonate in the ghetto, sound a death knell among would-be Sinn Féin voters south of the Border.
This week (March 10th) Daily Ireland editorialised that critics of the IRA statement would care little "if and when someone ends up in the dock charged with [ the McCartney] murder" . . . whether that person got there via "a face-to-face across a kitchen table in Belfast or two days hanging upside down in a cattle shed in Co Louth."
People would care very deeply in the South. But in the North we are coming to the marching season when the abnormal is normal. This year, as they have done for over a century, Orangemen will turn their faces from their Catholic neighbours for some weeks before the Twelfth, dance drunkenly around their huge, tribal fires, insult their neighbours' religion and march where they are not wanted.
And in Catholic ghetto areas people will sleep easier knowing that there are republican volunteers watching out for loyalist death squads.
And while all this is going on everyone will take it as a given that it is quite normal to suspend all political dialogue for the summer until the marching season is over and the Klansmen are at rest.
Nevertheless, that in the Republic and the wider constituency - and this includes George Bush's post-9/11 Washington - Sinn Féin seeks to influence the idea of voting for a party joined at the hip to an organisation which could even contemplate hanging people upside down for days is totally out of touch with reality.
And the publicity is set to get worse. Police investigations into the Northern Bank robbery can hardly fail to turn up more damning material. The Cab is getting its teeth into paramilitary money-laundering. On a more serious level, the families of other men said to have been murdered by the IRA are taking heart from the McCartney family's courage and are intent on having these cases reopened and pursued. So long as the IRA exists such killings are nearly inevitable.
Discipline within both the green and the orange paramilitaries is subject to fluctuation.
I remember during the Troubles, after the shooting of a garda in Wexford, a breach of the IRA's standing order No 8, that the IRA volunteer involved was ordered to give himself up, which he did, and served a sentence.
On the orange side I remember Andy Tyrie, the head of the UDA, personally going to the Belfast home of a UDA man who had been granted a temporary release from Mountjoy Prison but did not want to return, putting him in a car and driving him back to jail.
The contrast between either event and Sinn Féin's current inability to control Robert McCartney's killers says all that is required on the subject of authority as opposed to responsibility.
But while the Dublin anti-republican elite, its guru Michael McDowell and some sections of the media have seized upon Sinn Féin's discomfiture to go clog-dancing on what it hopes will be Sinn Féin's political coffin, let us remind ourselves that the peace process, and the development of Irish democracy, need Sinn Féin.
They'll be needed on the streets of Belfast to help ensure that rioting does not develop into a wider August 1969-type conflagration. And when the present clamour dies down, the Irish and British governments will still have to do business with these people.
So, some day, will the main beneficiary of the current state of play, the man now wearing the wall-to-wall grin, Ian Paisley, the man who threw the peace process into chaos before Christmas. The man whose malign influence at a time when Seán Lemass and Terence O'Neill were trying to bring North and South together not alone wrecked their efforts but had a direct influence on the political climate which gave rise to the Provisional IRA in the first place and kept the IRA alive thereafter.
Even if there was no criminality I would be suspicious of the Great Disturber's intentions towards Dublin, nationalism and Catholicism. But it is quite certain that so long as the IRA's activities offer him an excuse not to deal, deal he will not. For all his folksy old grandad interview with Dana, that old bigot is still capable of All Kinds of Everything.
Is Sinn Féin capable of holding an extraordinary ardfheis, where all can see the debate, the pain and the honesty of purpose which will be attendant on the party separating from the IRA?
Is the IRA willing to stand down voluntarily and without humiliation? It was talked of as part of the aborted pre-Christmas deal. It should be done now because it is right.
The coming Easter would be an appropriate time for republicans to answer those questions, although realistically, if such a development is to come, it would probably have to wait until at least the end of the marching season. But certainly the time has passed when a statement from P O'Neill would be sufficient reassurance.
Tim Pat Coogan is a former editor of the Irish Press and author of biographies of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera as well as On the Blanket; The IRA; 1916: The Easter Rising; and The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966-1996 and the Search for Peace.