Sinn Fein no longer has the leverage it once had now the violence card is unplayable, writes Ed Moloney.
Last week the Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams, emerged from an angry meeting with Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street to declare that the Northern peace process was "in deep crisis" as a consequence of the International Monitoring Commission's findings about continuing IRA activity and the operative links between the leaderships of that body and Sinn Féin.
Most people didn't need to have the phrase "in deep crisis" explained or translated for them, just as nothing that the IMC had to say about the workings of the Provos came as an exact surprise. They'd heard it many times before and knew that it was Mr Adams's way of suggesting, as with "They haven't gone away, you know!", that if things continued to deteriorate, well, who knows what might happen. The IRA might even dig up the arms dumps and resume its war.
This use of the hinted threat of renewed violence is one of the two levers the leadership of Sinn Féin and the IRA have skilfully manipulated to ensure that the British, Irish and American governments kept the conveyor belt of concessions whirring along. The other, closely related pressure is the fear that some day the scales might finally drop off the eyes of rank-and- file Provos and as they realise that their leaders' strategy is likely to mean accepting many of the things they spent years fighting to destroy, they begin to ask dark questions about how all this came to pass.
The latter fear persuaded all three governments at various times in the last decade to turn a blind eye to IRA operations, including murders, shootings, bombings, arms smuggling, robberies and so on.
Incidentally it is this Nelson's eye approach by the governments and their security arms which really gives the lie to those who allege a "securocrat" conspiracy to isolate the Provos and do down the peace process.
The argument that won out in officialdom was that Mr Adams and his colleagues needed to bring their "hard men" down the peace road and it would therefore be unwise for government to pressure the IRA to abandon its ways in case this alerted them to what was going on before they had passed the point of no return. So great was this fear that it was propitiated even at the expense of destabilising other partners in the process, notably David Trimble, brought down by a decommissioning process distinguished by its opacity.
The publication of the IMC report, combined with recent signs of pugnacity towards, and impatience with Sinn Féin and the IRA on the part of the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and the new White House envoy to the North, Mitchell Reiss, may be signs that officialdom is finally wakening up to the recognition that the once powerful levers pushed and pulled by the Provo leadership are now connected to nothing but thin air, rendered largely useless by the passage of time.
Take first, the threat that the IRA could go back to war. Nobody doubts that the IRA has the capacity to explode bombs and use guns. But does it have the capacity to deploy sufficient weaponry, long enough and intensely enough to change British and Irish policy? The answer, for both military and political reasons, has to be no.
The present IRA ceasefire has been in place now for at least seven years, more than twice as long as US involvement in the second World War.
In that time experienced IRA activists have aged, their cutting edge blunted in line with their expanding waistlines. To be sure the IRA has recruited new members in the interim but these are "ceasefire soldiers" and anyone with knowledge of the IRA will tell you that each time there is a ceasefire its ranks are bloated with new members who disappear like snow off a ditch in spring once the violence resumes.
The real pool of available military talent, so to speak, is pretty shallow.
At the same time nationalist support for the ceasefire is evidently high and tolerance of an IRA decision to resume warfare, even in its strongest areas, is likely to be very low. History, both recent and bygone, tells us clearly that for these sort of reasons each time the IRA goes into a ceasefire it comes out in a much weakened state, its enthusiasm for, and ability to wage war eroded by an internal and public expectation of better things.
Michael Collins knew this and so do today's republican leaders, people like Gerry Adams who opposed both of the IRA's first ceasefires, in 1972 and 1975, on these very grounds. And for that reason no one knows better how unfit the IRA is to resume war after a ceasefire that has lasted much, much longer than either of those two cessations, and whose popularity in the IRA's war zones is greater.
While the military arguments against the IRA going back to violence are compelling, the political ones are irresistible. Sinn Féin's electoral growth on both sides of the Border has been fuelled by the peace process; each time the IRA has moved farther away from violence the voters have rewarded Sinn Féin.
Political soothsaying is a risky business but it would be the safest of bets to predict that most of this support would dissolve, and along with it any chance of Sinn Féin claiming cabinet seats in Belfast or Dublin, should the IRA go back to war.
Along with this, Mr Adams knows that in this post-September 11th world, he and his colleagues could expect to be cast out of decent society and made pariahs once again if the IRA went back to its bad old ways, denied the entree, access, funding and lifestyle they clearly savour. Going back to war is a zero sum game for both Sinn Féin and the IRA.
As the viability of renewed armed struggle has diminished, so too has the threat from the so-called "hard men" of the IRA, although this danger was always overstated.
The present leadership of the IRA has had two decades to place its allies in key posts and the value of this could be clearly seen at the time of the Real IRA defections of 1997, when the bulk of the IRA in the North, where it matters, stayed loyal to the Adams leadership.
The rebellion stirred by Michael McKevitt, over core republican principles, should have been the point at which the "hard men" played their cards but the fact that they didn't is powerful evidence that they probably never will and that the current leadership's control over the IRA, and whether it fully disarms and disbands, is absolute. The empirical evidence from Belfast and elsewhere is that any remaining malcontents have given up and moved on to new lives while the bulk of IRA members have accommodated themselves to the new order more or less happily. The reality is that the implicit threats from the IRA that spurred on the peace process in the early days are now empty ones, although, as recent events demonstrate, the Sinn Féin leadership behaves as if everyone else should still believe they are as potent as ever.
The North is fast approaching the point where it will hardly matter if the Good Friday institutions are restored or not, or if the Provo leadership takes the final steps from revolutionary to constitutional politics.
What really matters is that the IRA's war is over, that it cannot be credibly resumed and that the ceasefires are solid for as far into the future as most care to look. As long as fairness is guaranteed many people will settle for that.
The evidence from the report of the International Monitoring Commission and elsewhere is that the governments are possibly beginning to realise this. The question is whether Sinn Féin and the IRA do.
Gerry Adams has deservedly won plaudits for his tactical and political skills during the peace process but will history ultimately judge that he badly overplayed his hand?
Ed Moloney is author of A Secret History of the IRA