The latest killings in Northern Ireland and the renewed efforts to have Sinn Fein removed from the talks will send a chill through Irish-America. There has been a sense over here that the only thing that could save David Trimble from entering real negotiations after all the stallings of the past few months was an identifiable break in the IRA ceasefire.
Thus, the new killings come at the worst possible moment, at a time when it seemed that even the British government was prepared to be more imaginative than it has been, according to some talks participants, in envisaging a comprehensive settlement. Republican sources stated yesterday they were suspicious of the events surrounding the killings. They also firmly denied they were involved in the Dougan killing.
"I would be very surprised if the IRA were involved," said one source, who added it would need more than speculative comments from David Trimble or leaks to the media to force them from the talks. The source was also adamant that it was highly unlikely that it was an unauthorised IRA operation, pointing out that the consequences of such an action from the IRA itself would deter any mavericks from carrying it out.
They point to the immediate leaking of a description of the men arrested in the loyalist shooting as "IRA suspects" as suspicious. They say the RUC will rarely characterise people in custody in such a way immediately after an arrest. They claim that the aftermath of the killings has seen an orchestrated attempt to push them out of the talks without anything but speculation at this point as to who was responsible.
"Unless [RUC Chief Constable Ronnie] Flanagan can come up with clear-cut forensic evidence, there is no way this can be pursued."
The source also said the drugs-related killing the night before was "very difficult" to pin down. "Because drugs were involved it could have been literally anyone," he said. If either is found to be an IRA operation, however - and some sources say the RUC has real evidence that both are - David Trimble can go down on his knees and thank the fates that he has at least some friends among the republican community in west Belfast who have taken him off the hook at a vital time.
Certainly, if the IRA was about to break its ceasefire, it makes no sense to do so just six weeks or so before the talks conclusion and to do so by gunning down a relatively inconsequential drug dealer and a middle-ranking UDA member.
IRA operations, however, have rarely followed a discernible logic. David Trimble will clearly make the best of this new opportunity to refuse to negotiate. Even the White House was shocked when his colleague Jeffrey Donald son, considered in the US as the most level-headed of the unionists, was seen on CNN tearing up the Framework Document as Trimble chortled alongside him.
Trimble won himself no friends in Washington with that scene. Indeed, some Irish-American organisations have begun lobbying the White House to refuse him access to the President on his next visit. The grounds for such a move, they say, would be that other party heads such as Gerry Adams and the loyalist leaders were given access only to lower levels of the White House when their commitment to the overall peace process was being questioned.
Trimble's statement on RTE yesterday that he believed Sinn Fein was irrelevant to any pro posed agreement, plus his party's refusal to countenance any meaningful North-South bodies in their paper also released yesterday, were other examples of unionist arrogance and failure to face facts that will not play well in the US.
In a society as dysfunctional as Northern Ireland, where men like David Trimble can one year discuss the battle lines at Drumcree with Billy Wright and a few years later shout loudest about breaches of the Mitchell Principles by other parties, there is always going to be a certain air of unreality about events.
For instance, he not only wants Sinn Fein out of the talks, but he has made it evident that he wants Mo Mowlam out too, because she ignores much of his foot-stamping and his attempts to railroad the talks agenda. It is known he has gone to the British Prime Minister to discuss his unhappiness with her and his desire to see her gone.
Not that the British government has entirely clean hands either. Indeed, there is ample evidence that the British government itself is in breach of the principles. Recent disclosures in the Ireland on Sunday newspaper about British intelligence files handed to it by the IRA in south Armagh show that individuals on both sides of the Border are clearly being targeted by the British army despite the ceasefire.
So let those without sin cast the first stone. Perhaps we have all been too optimistic in expecting killings and targetings to stop on all sides because a magic wand called the Mitchell Principles was suddenly waved. If so, we need to face the new reality. Talks without Sinn Fein and the loyalist paramilitaries will indeed not be worth Fergus Finlay's proverbial penny candle.
Any notion that a deal can be cut between the centrist parties and the governments and made stick is mistaken. That is the only real lesson from the last 30 years of failed solutions - that to cut out the extremes only prolongs the alienation and the root causes of the conflict.
Where does that leave the two governments and the parties concerned? Obviously in a cleft stick - damned if they do, damned if they don't, if it is proven that the IRA brought about the latest violence. There is a nightmare scenario.
If indeed Sinn Fein is cast out and if an effort is made to exclude the PUP - whose military wing, the UVF, is suspected of the attempted shooting of an LVF leader two days ago - the talks for all intents and purposes collapse. David Trimble will no longer have the sufficient consensus on the unionist side and on the nationalist side, the SDLP will be left as the forlorn standard-bearer.
The governments must decide between the moral imperative as evinced in the Mitchell Principles and the political pragmatism which has somehow allowed these talks to continue despite almost every setback imaginable.
Political leaders were faced with the same choice in South Africa when violence outside the talks threatened to bring down the negotiations. They soldiered on to the bitter end and successfully negotiated a settlement by keeping the parties at the table.
Now that we are in sight of the finish line, the Irish peace talks should do the same.
Niall O'Dowd is founding publisher of the Irish Voice in New York
Mary Holland is indisposed