The Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, may have been indulging in a flourish of rhetoric when he said yesterday that he was prepared to accept the Mitchell principles, provided that everyone else involved in genuine all party talks did so too. He amplified this statement by repeating his party's position that disarmament must include all weapons, including those of the security forces. He also, in a separate interview, made it clear that while he insisted that Sinn Fein and the IRA were not different sides of the same coin, he would not participate in the "politics of condemnation" by denouncing any future act of violence that the IRA might commit.
Not unexpectedly, both the Ulster Unionist leader and a prominent Tory backbencher saw Mr Adams as engaging in deviousness and cynicism. Time will tell if they are right. Mr Trimble went hot foot, metaphorically, to the British Prime Minister to ask him to prevent "elements within the Northern Ireland Office" from being tempted to open the talks backdoor to Sinn Fein. (The NIO had already closed it by saying Mr Adams's statement, without a restoration of the IRA ceasefire, was not enough.) Mr David Wilshire, the vice president of the Conservative backbench committee on Northern Ireland, interpreted the statement as a way of dodging the questions of decommissioning and the ceasefire.
No doubt the election for the Northern Forum makes it inevitable that reflex reactions of this kind will be made. The process engaged in by Sinn Fein and the IRA follows its own rules, and nothing that Mr Trimble or Mr Wilshire says is designed to influence its outcome or has any expectation of doing so. Scoring political points, at this stage, is not the best way of bringing the political process forward.
The overwhelming majority of people in this island, North and South, want political violence to end, and the abandoning of the ceasefire by the IRA and Sinn Fein's ambiguities before and since go against the spirit of the times as both organisations indirectly acknowledge. But while there is much frustration at the delays and at the logic chopping demands of Mr Adams, it is futile to ignore the nature of the current debate in the republican movement which has historic dimensions. Statements in the last 10 days by some prominent members of Sinn Fein have suggested that the arguments may be edging towards a decision in favour of the political option and accepting that the ceasefire is an essential prerequisite. On the other hand, another leading member, Mr Gerry Kelly, says explicitly that no ceasefire is likely before June 10th.
In these circumstances, Mr Adams's equivocation yesterday may be an expression of the dilemma facing republicanism. He shows that the Mitchell principles are not a difficulty as far as he is concerned; but he is apparently not in a position yet to deliver the ceasefire without which, whatever he says about Mitchell, he cannot take part in talks. He has exhausted the explanations and concessions which he could ask for to persuade the IRA to lay down its arms. Mr Bruton at Finglas and Mr Major in his article in this newspaper last week have done their utmost to provide assurances (but Sinn Fein is not the only party to be accommodated). By now, what remains to be done is for Mr Adams to state clearly that he is on the side of the talks process, and to persuade the IRA that this is the only right course.