You’d think that even Gerry Adams would be bored to death with all his lame explanations about why everyone else is to blame. And why the little matter of IRA decommissioning has got nothing to do with Ulster’s endless impasse.

The answer surely is obvious. Declare your war is over. Give up your guns and the Unionists might just start trusting you and the peace process, the Stormont Assembly et al, might truly begin to work.

After all, why does a supposedly democratic party need to hang on to guns and bombs if it truly is a democratic party? Like lots of simple questions in Ireland the real answer is complex and mired in myth, murder and political strategy.

The first part of the answer lies in history and the actions of the man the present Irish Republic, and the Provisionals, revere as the founding father of the State. When Padraig Pearse, and his doomed rag-tag rebel army, took over the General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin at Easter in 1916 and walked outside to proclaim an Irish republic, he wasn’t trumpeting the greatness of parliamentary politics.

The Easter Proclamation was, and is, a chilling semifascistic rant that is heavy on the power of arms, blood sacrifice and dead children to bring a united Ireland into being. Killing “alien” British soldiers was, Pearse declared, the “fundamental right” of all true Irish republicans. Guns and bombs were the way forward.

In the end, Pearse got what he wanted, a honourable execution by baffled British Army generals, but his poisonous legacy lived on, inspiring generation after generation of young Irishmen to take up the gun.

The proclamation is still read out, usually by a child, at every republican Easter commemoration, traditionally held at the graveside of dead IRA volunteers. Peace process or no peace process, there will be the same bitter words at Easter 2003 as there were in 1916.

For decades guns were the raison d’être of the republican movement. Shooting squaddies in the head and blowing up cities distinguished the IRA from all the other sell-outs, traitors and gombeen-men (usurers) who crowded into the Irish Dail. In republican eyes politics was synonymous with treachery.

Giving up guns is not therefore just another tactical move in the drawn-out Ulster conflict, it is a revolutionary overthrow of the IRA’s founding myths. For the IRA the possession of weaponry has a totemic power, far greater than its military value. Guns are part of the IRA’s constitution. “Decommissioning” IRA weapons is like spitting on Pearse’s grave.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are all too aware of how tricky the decommissioning issue is for their republican rank and file. If Sinn Fein truly were a democratic party there would be no decommissioning at all. There are no votes in Irish republicanism in destroying the IRA’s limited and precious arsenal.

But luckily Sinn Fein is a democratic party in the same way as the “democratic centralist” communist parties of the Eastern bloc were democratic. Adams and McGuinness are part of the same tiny hermetic leadership elite that has ruled the IRA since the early 1970s. They fire and call the shots.

It is clear that Adams does now accept that he will have to provide an “act of completion” — a significant act of arms destruction — to get the Unionists back into the Stormont Assembly. In truth, any act of “decommissioning” is really just an act of political symbolism — terrorist groups can always replenish their arsenal tomorrow and most of the IRA’s big London bombs relied on agricultural fertiliser as explosive.

But symbols still count for a lot in Ulster. David Trimble has demanded that this future act of IRA decommissioning be filmed to reassure critics within the Unionist camp that the IRA is at last living up to its promises.

Hell will freeze over first.

Internally the IRA can never be seen to surrender to the ancient English enemy. There can be no humiliating television pictures to be played over and over in the bars of Dundalk of how the Bold Fenian Men of the Provisional IRA got down on their knees and handed their guns to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at the behest of the loathed David Trimble.

The minute such pictures did appear is the same minute that the Provisionals would split and the buried political vault that currently contains physical-force republicanism break open. A new IRA-style terror group would soon stalk the fields of Ireland.

We might get more details, have more independent witnesses, but all and every act of republican sacrilege — destroying guns — will remain shrouded in the fog of denial.

The third and final reason for the interminable delay on decommissioning is tactics. The IRA’s guns are its last aces in the hole, the biggest bargaining chip that the Provisionals have. It is their final guarantee that the Brits will live up to the unspoken bargain that underpins the entire peace process; that in return for an IRA cessation of violence the British Crown will slowly, covertly, but irrevocably, retreat from its last Irish province.

When Gerry Adams plays that card he wants to be sure that he can extract the highest price.

No one should be fooled. The IRA might bury its guns but its fundamental aim remains the same. Like the organisation’s political forefather Pearse, it doesn’t want to accommodate British rule in Ireland, it wants to destroy it politically.

Kevin Toolis is the author of Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA Soul.

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