For years the raucous St Patrick’s Day parades in America’s big cities have been upstaged by the much bigger, slightly more sober, but infinitely more bizarre St Patrick’s Day Charade that is rolled out on the immaculate green lawns of the nation’s capital.

Bill Clinton started it, at the behest of his erstwhile friend, Tony Blair. The traditional welcome offered each March 17 to Irish leaders, nationalists and Unionists, officials from Dublin and London, all distinguished by their commitment to a constitutional route to securing peace in Northern Ireland, would in future be extended to the men and women who had aggressively reserved the right to eschew that process, the representatives of Sinn Fein.

Where Margaret Thatcher had once tried to starve the terrorists of the “oxygen of publicity”, the United States Government was now eagerly manning the life-support. Mr Adams and his friends were to be fêted at the White House, treated as partners in the peace process.

It was, I’ve no doubt, a well-meant attempt to use the leverage of the world’s superpower to propel the terrorists and their sympathisers to the negotiating table. It might even be said to have worked, after a fashion, in a sense, for a while, maybe.

But there was always a more sinister, shameless domestic American political dimension to it too. It marked an ugly obeisance to the power of Irish republicanism in America. It was a genuflection in the direction of the ranks of the professional Irish-Americans on Capitol Hill and elsewhere across America — men and women who make a living out of their ersatz solidarity with a people whose suffering they know nothing about and whose politics they romanticise and distort to their own dubious ends.

Even after September 11, the day Americans received a brutal reminder of the effectiveness of the kind of handiwork perfected over the years by the IRA, the show went on — in bars and pubs across America, and, of course, in Washington. But yesterday the procession came to a jarring halt.

A consensus has emerged in the past month among Sinn Fein’s supporters in the US that it is time for their friends to dismantle the IRA. The Bush Administration has demanded it. Hillary Clinton, not only heir to her husband’s strategy but a politician with a relevant constituency of her own as a senator from New York, has called for it. God knows, even dear old Ted Kennedy, the full-fed, secular archbishop of Irish America, resplendent again yesterday in his Bostonian greenery, has told them it’s time to go.

It is wonderful news that the selfappointed, preening tribunes of Irish-American opinion and their hangers-on have concurred that it is time for the IRA to leave the stage. But I have some questions for all these who have now suddenly decided that the Provisionals are a gang of thugs and murderers who must be brought to justice.

Why does it take the killing of an Irish Catholic outside a Belfast pub to open your perceptive eyes to the reality of Irish republicanism? Where were you when it was a couple of dozen innocent British — Protestants and Catholics alike — in a Birmingham pub? Why were you not similarly outraged when off-duty soldiers and their families were the targets in Woolwich and Guildford? What exactly were you doing and saying when they tried to wipe out half the British Cabinet as they lay sleeping in their hotel beds? Don’t get me wrong. The murder of Robert McCartney is no less heinous than any of the IRA’s other offences. It is as much a study in murderous infamy as the remarkable response of his heroic sisters is a lesson in courage for all who love peace and justice.

But that surely is the point. The McCartney horror is not, as the word now has it on the streets of New York and Boston, some startling revelation of the way these men behave, not some grisly departure from the honourable Irish fight for freedom. It merely confirms what most decent Irish have known about the IRA for years.

So let me answer my own questions. The tragedy heaped on the McCartney family and the brave stand of the McCartney sisters have not opened the eyes of Irish-American leaders to the horror of the IRA. They have not even shamed these leaders.

They have merely made them start to worry about the political expediency of being seen alongside men whose own standing has suddenly dropped sharply. Where the McCartney sisters display true leadership, in the face of the gravest peril, the Irish American chiefs step heroically into line.

So in many ways yesterday’s spectacle of Adams being snubbed at the White House and on parts of Capitol Hill, being sternly lectured to by Ted Kennedy and Representative Peter King (a longstanding apologist for Sinn Fein) and others, is even more nauseating than the one we used to watch at the White House each year.

Irish America’s leaders, in other words, are showing exactly the same level of courage as they demonstrated when they looked away for 20 years or more as their supporters dropped $100 bills into the collection buckets so that the IRA could buy the guns and the Semtex that would kill and maim thousands of innocents at a nice safe distance of thousands of miles away.

Forgive me if, as an Englishman with a proud Irish lineage myself, I decline to join in the commendations.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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