Aengus O Snodaigh, a Sinn Fein TD whose associates have been known to wear masks and carry baseball bats, neatly underlined the crazy world that is modern Irish politics in a recent parliamentary question to Michael McDowell, the minister for justice. O Snodaigh wanted to know if the Irish government has been “passively or actively involved in the carrying out of abductions by foreign secret services on the state’s territory”.

Had the question come from Michael D Higgins, Labour’s self-styled man of conscience, it would not merit mention. But from O Snodaigh it brings a reminder that Northern Ireland’s peace process has managed to corrupt politics so absolutely on this island that the bizarre now passes for the normal.

The Provisional IRA and some of O Snodaigh’s colleagues in the upper echelons of Sinn Fein have engaged in many, many abductions and murders over the years. That, of course, is all deemed ancient history in this brave new world of political forgiveness, but O Snodaigh’s close associates have more recent form. Niall Binead, one of his electoral workers, was arrested and convicted in late 2004 of his involvement in, among other things, an IRA spy ring that gathered intelligence on cabinet ministers and TDs. Political subversion, pure and simple.

For O Snodaigh and his Sinn Fein colleagues, however, actions and associations have no consequences. They inhabit a charmed world where judgment has been suspended and where the truth is warped so far out of shape that it becomes inverted, or replaced by a lie.

We have allowed ourselves to swallow the propaganda that Provisional republicanism is made up of two branches, Sinn Fein and the IRA, even though we know they are umbilically connected, sharing much the same leadership, the same goals and the same determination to subvert this state.

So O Snodaigh’s question will be treated with all seriousness, and will be met with nods of approval from the left. He will not be asked to account for the men and woman abducted, tortured and murdered by members of his organisation, because it is just too awkward to drag up the past. It’s time to move on. So no awkward questions for Gerry Adams, please, about whether he played a role in the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. No, let’s fret instead about American flights to and from Shannon airport. That’s a nice comfort zone, where moral outrage can be vented against the Bush administration, and one in which O Snodaigh can try and make like a normal politician rather than a tainted mouthpiece for an organisation allowed to live a lie.

The artificial distinction that Ireland’s political and media establishments have drawn between Sinn Fein and the IRA makes for a simple life. Last week Noel Conroy, the garda commissioner, could talk about a crackdown against the IRA’s criminal activities, and political life could continue as normal for the IRA’s elected offspring.

The International Monitoring Commission (IMC) could report that the IRA was still actively involved in criminality and intelligence gathering, and Dermot Ahern, the minister for foreign affairs, could say that the report made a “persuasive case for politics”. And, thanks to a neat piece of diversionary choreography, our political leaders could choose to ignore the IMC’s assertion that the IRA might have held on to some of its weapons, even though the organisation assured us that it had decommissioned everything.

Thankfully John de Chastelain’s decommissioning body chose to counter the IMC’s warning by insisting that its assertion last year of total decommissioning was “correct”. He, and therefore we, can trust the IRA. How reassuring.

The big screaming lie in all of this is, of course, that false distinction between Sinn Fein and the IRA. They are effectively one and the same, and the continued existence of the military wing of the provisional movement says all that needs to be said about its bona fides. Sinn Fein/IRA represents a criminal conspiracy against this state. It is immersed in crime, is engaged in intelligence gathering, may or may not have retained an armed capability, and remains wedded to its own interpretations of what constitutes a criminal act.

And what do we do? We clap Sinn Fein on the back, pretend the IRA is separate, and tell Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist party it had better get used to the idea of going into government with them.

Conroy can crack down on IRA crime, but there will be no political consequences for Sinn Fein. The hypocrisy will grow ever deeper. Sinn Fein will soon, we are told, agree to accept the policing and justice systems in Northern Ireland, though there are certain to be more concessions extracted.

One concession that the British and Irish governments will not even attempt to extract from Sinn Fein, however, is that it assists the police forces on both sides of the border to shut down republican criminality.

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