Analysis: Deaglán de Bréadún assesses the latest turn in the saga of the so-called "Colombia Three".
In an ironic way, the return of the so-called "Colombia Three" could be seen as an indirect confirmation that the republican movement has definitively taken the political path.
While James Monaghan said in his RTÉ interview that their reappearance on Irish soil was not part of any deal in the peace process, it can hardly be a coincidence that the story broke just eight days after the IRA ordered its volunteers to dump arms.
The thinking behind the decision to put the three men into the public eye like this must be that the war is over and that public opinion and the inclination of the Government will be to leave them more or less alone.
Mr Monaghan emphasised that he would be happy to talk to the Garda Síochána, but he did not consider himself "on the run".
Given that the three had expert legal advice, not only from Colombian lawyers but also from Irish, US and Australian practitioners, they must be banking heavily on the fact that Ireland does not have an extradition treaty with Colombia.
The Colombian authorities themselves are quite open about this, but they are relying on the fact that an Interpol arrest warrant has been issued for the three.However, arresting them is one thing. Putting them on a plane to Bogota to serve sentences of 17½ years is quite another.
In the event that there is an attempt to arrest them, it would appear that they will give themselves up quietly, and the weight of evidence suggests at this stage that the trio are not trying to avoid the authorities here.
However, should the matter come to a court hearing, you would not need to be a rocket scientist to expect that their lawyers, backed up by the extremely active Bring Them Home campaign and by the men's families, would be to the fore in highlighting Colombia's human rights record.
While they are at it, the Bring Them Home campaign will presumably have to change its name to the "Keep Them Home" campaign. It is noteworthy that, even in Britain today, there are difficulties in extraditing al-Qaeda suspects to countries which might be considered likely to abuse human rights.
The affair is deeply embarrassing to the Government, not to mention London and even Washington. But, even at this early stage, it would not be surprising if the three were counting on international human rights legislation to protect them from a return to La Modelo, the notorious prison outside Bogota in which they spent most of their incarceration.
The three men and/or their advisers are taking an extraordinary gamble. While the spotlight was on Mr Monaghan last night - his grey hair dyed blond and sporting a goatee beard - the focus may well shift towards another bearded republican, one Gerry Adams MP, who will be expected by his followers to oppose any move to send these men to South American "perdition" and to emphasise the potential damage to the peace process in the "republican heartland" if such a move occurred.
This bizarre affair undoubtedly contains further twists and turns, but already it has entered the annals as one of the most extraordinary sagas in the history of Irish republicanism.
The initial daft journey to Colombia, for whatever purpose, was remarkable enough, but further strange developments were to follow: i.e. the involvement of the US embassy in Bogota in forensic tests on the three men after their arrest and the subsequent contradiction of those results by other tests conducted by the Colombians themselves.
The trial of the three, which seemed to go on forever, had some curious and dramatic moments, not least the presentation of two witnesses as allegedly illiterate deserters from the Marxist guerrilla movement known as the Farc, who testified that they had seen the three men training their comrades in the finer points of IRA bomb-making techniques.
In the event, the initial trial led to a "not guilty" verdict on the main charge of training the Farc, but the men were found guilty of travelling on false passports.
This is an issue which could haunt one of them - Niall Connolly, who was alleged to be using a false Irish passport, whereas Mr Monaghan and Martin McCauley were alleged to have used fake British ones.
It is not often that one sees a government taken completely by surprise, but this was indeed the case yesterday. Nobody seems to have known in advance about this turn of events, and this was reflected in the cryptic and non-committal responses when reporters rang up for comment.
The sheer daring - their political opponents will say "brass neck and effrontery" - of the three in dashing once more into the news and on to the political stage has been a major shock also for the peace process, akin perhaps to the Northern Bank raid last Christmas.
It will take the political system, North and South and throughout these islands, some considerable time to recover its composure.
But one thing is certain: we are going to hear a lot more about the Colombia Three.