Analysis: Sinn Féin and the IRA are backed into a corner and may find it hard to escape, writes Gerry Moriarty.
In south Armagh yesterday afternoon Gerry Adams was telling hardline heartland republicanism that Sinn Féin and the IRA are in a corner and may have to do something substantial to get out of it. That message appears to be finally getting through at all levels of Provisional republicanism.
Around the same time, in another republican heartland, the Short Strand in east Belfast, ordinary nationalists and republicans were delivering a similar message to Sinn Féin and the IRA at a rally in support of the family of murder victim Robert McCartney. The point made in the Short Strand was that republicans must deliver big time.
The republican writ runs strong in such areas as the Short Strand and therefore it is unusual that senior republicans would be confronted so vocally and so publicly there. But that's exactly what happened yesterday when Sinn Féin Assembly member Alex Maskey and Cllr Joe O'Donnell turned up to "support" the rally.
Their appearance was not universally welcomed. It takes a lot to rattle Maskey but he was a little rattled yesterday. Do you feel welcome in the Short Strand, he was asked by a reporter.
"Do you hear anybody asking me to leave?" he said, bristling.
There were about 500 people in Short Strand for the rally, most of them from the area. One native now living elsewhere in the city was Gerry McKay who made his feelings known to Belfast's former lord mayor face to face as Maskey was conducting an impromptu press conference.
Maskey was telling us he did not know whether the current tumult around the death of Robert McCartney would affect the Sinn Féin vote but, regardless, Sinn Féin did not take the electorate anywhere, at any time, for granted.
McKay reminded Maskey that while three IRA members were expelled from the organisation because of their alleged involvement in McCartney's murder, several others - nine more, according to McKay - were implicated as well.
"They are part of the Provisional IRA. You are going to hand them over?" asked McKay, who we soon learned has a personal interest in the matter.
"I can't hand anybody over," said Maskey.
"They butchered my nephew, they butchered him, and all I am asking you is, hand the 12 of them over. You have handed three over. Hand the other nine over," said McKay, who then walked away in disgust and anger.
The interview was cut short as the McCartney sisters and Bridgeen, partner of the murdered man, and the extended McCartney family paraded to the shops at Mount Pottinger Road, where the rally was staged.
The anguished look on their faces told the story that four weeks on they are all still devastated by the murder of Robert. But there was steel behind the distress. They carried placards that conveyed a message not normally proclaimed against Sinn Féin and the IRA in the Short Strand.
"We want the individuals who are bringing us all down brought to justice", read one placard. Another asked "Who's Next?". A third poster asked "Why My Daddy?"
The crowd were firmly behind the McCartneys as Robert's sister, Paula, told them that if her brother's killers "walk free from this, then everyone in Ireland should fear for the consequences". She said there were IRA members and other republicans who in the past took a principled stand in defending the area but that the men who killed Robert had no such principles.
"Their only concern while Robert lay dripping with blood was to clear up the mess and go and have another pint," she said.
Journalist and socialist campaigner Eamon McCann also spoke with customary passion and remarked that some of those involved in attacking Robert McCartney had returned on the day of the murder from the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration in Derry.
"The hardest thing that I can say about them is that they have brought themselves and the organisation of which apparently some of them were a part, they have brought themselves to the level of the British paratroopers in the Bogside," he thundered.
The message in the Short Strand yesterday and for days to come is that while locals may care little about the Northern Bank robbery, they care deeply about the brutal butchering of one of their own.
Fifty miles south, Mr Adams was indicating he was receiving that message. He already knows that on a broader scale the Northern Bank robbery, and the alleged IRA money-laundering and the general culture of social corruption that is developing around republican arrogance and criminality, could damage Sinn Féin's electoral ambitions.
He spoke of republicans having to make "more hard choices" and take "more hard decisions".
Such is the gathering swell of opinion against republican hubris that, as the Americans say, if they deliver a day late and a dollar short it won't impress.