It was regrettable in the extreme that the Orange Order, having enhanced its standing and dignity at the Drumcree service, should have yet again raised tensions by deciding to switch its main march on the Twelfth to the Ormeau Road. While the Parades Commission has now banned the proposed change of route, it was disingenuous for the Order's officers to have declared that it was not "upping the ante" and that it did not seek confrontation. To propose to march 20,000 Orangemen within yards of an intensely nationalist district like the Lower Ormeau is akin to throwing lighted matches into a powder shed while declaring that one does not want an explosion.
If Mr Blair and Mr Ahern had set about it deliberately they could hardly have picked a less propitious page of the calendar for their proposals to bring the new Executive into operation and to start the decommissioning of paramilitary arms. To ask unionists to move out of their mindset in the early weeks of July might be compared to asking republicans at Easter to ponder the constitutional benefits of monarchy.
Yet this is the background against which the Ulster Unionists have to decide whether they will take a leap of faith, bringing the Executive into being, or whether they will hold back, with the virtual certainty that efforts to restore devolved power to Northern Ireland will be shelved for the present. The Prime Minister, the Taoiseach, and the leaders of the SDLP, have argued cogently for the unionists to seize the prize. Mr Trimble, undoubtedly, would wish to do so. But his party is not persuaded that Sinn Fein speaks for the IRA or that the failsafe mechanisms have the qualities of either fairness or guaranteed workability. His position is hardly helped by the Taoiseach's declaration that Sinn Fein and the IRA are separate organisations or by Mr Gerry Adams's assertion that Sinn Fein does not speak for any "armed group".
This newspaper has consistently maintained that the initiative in the decommissioning impasse had to rest with Sinn Fein/IRA and that Mr Trimble has been right to insist that the republican axis must choose irrevocably , as he put it himself, between "the party" and "the army". But whether or not Sinn Fein and the IRA are one and the same (and the best-informed security sources say that "the party" is subsidiary to the "army") they have now placed themselves in an absolute strait-jacket vis-a-vis General de Chastelain's decommissioning body. Heretofore, the republicans might have had access to government for a few token guns put out of action. The price they must now pay is total, verifiable disarmament by May of next year. Their own obduracy has, in fact, hobbled them in the end. It can be a signal achievement for the wholly-democratic parties and the governments, if only some of Mr Trimble's colleagues have the wit to recognise it.
A statement from the IRA, confirming what Sinn Fein has signed up to, would be helpful, for all that it must be unlikely. The failsafe mechanisms must be buttressed by law, as Mr John Bruton counselled since the emergence of the current proposals. The unionists would be thought wise and brave, and not imprudent, if they were to take the tide of opportunity now offered. Mr Trimble can secure the end of the IRA and the withdrawal of the Republic's territorial claim on Northern Ireland if this deal succeeds. If it is tried and if the IRA fails General de Chastelain's tests, unionists will hold the high moral ground. For them, it is a winwin situation. Yet if there has been one consistency running through 30 years of the Troubles, it is unionism's inability to recognise where its own best interests lie. The next week will tell if Mr Trimble can be the persuader of his people.