THE Ulster police chief’s denunciation of the Provisional IRA as bank robbers is a catastrophe that leaves a decade of patient and tedious peace negotiations in ruins.

We are back to square one in terms of building a peace deal in Northern Ireland.

Over the next few weeks, opponents of the Ulster accord, such as the DUP of Ian Paisley, will systematically try to tear up the floorboards of the Good Friday agreement and shred every document attesting to the IRA’s so-called commitment to peace.

The blame obviously lies entirely with the IRA and its leadership for failing to break from its old ways of the “armalite, the bank robbery and the ballot box”. But the key question is not whether the Provisional IRA carried out the bank robbery, but whether Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness can ever be trusted again.

By so unequivocally asserting that the Provos were responsible, Chief Constable Hugh Orde, with the explicit backing of Downing Street, is telling us the answer.

And the answer is no. Not now, not tomorrow, never.

Picture the scene at some future historic peace deal summit. Tony Blair, or his successor, is at the podium answering questions on the political bona fides of his republican peace partners and their “very real commitment” to a future peace process. “I have asked Mr Adams and he has assured me today that the IRA has given up robbing banks and will decommission all their arms,” says the Prime Minister.

After yesterday, few in Northern Ireland, or the wider world, would rate such future potential IRA assurances as more than verbal dross.

And, put bluntly, if the IRA’s promises are worthless, then there is no peace deal worth having in Northern Ireland.

There are still lot of questions to be answered. How could the IRA leadership, including Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness, be so stupid as to endorse/allow/oversee/be unaware of the consequences of their comrades’/subordinates’ heist at the Northern Bank?

Who was the political dunderhead on the IRA Army Council, one of seven men, who argued that the IRA could carry out such a robbery, using textbook IRA tactics, and that the finger of suspicion would never be directed at republicans? And where were every other IRA Army Council member’s brains when they agreed?

Whatever the exact answers, we can derive only two equally depressing assessments about the current status of the Provisional IRA.

One, the IRA, despite decades of political posturing, remains a malevolent, irreformable terrorist organisation incapable of adhering to the rule of law. Two, the IRA is a stupid, malevolent, irreformable terrorist organisation.

War is not likely to break out in Northern Ireland in the foreseeable future. The deal will hold, but the Northern Bank robbery places real question marks over where the future peace road goes.

Like virginity, political trust, once lost can never be regained.

For upwards of a decade Gerry Adams has been assuring the world that the IRA really has changed, and things are different now. But, according to Hugh Orde and Tony Blair, those promises, like the IRA’s denials of involvement in the robbery, are just lies.

It is clearly going to take some time before future IRA promises on decommissioning, or anything, are ever going to be believed at all.

Kevin Toolis is the author of Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul, Picador

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