The primary issue to arise from the alleged attempted abduction of Bobby Tohill in Belfast on Friday evening is not whether this represents the IRA's continued paramilitarism but whether it is another scam by some security personnel to sabotage the resumption of power-sharing in Northern Ireland, writes Vincent Browne.
Let me deal with the IRA paramilitarism issue first. Of course the IRA has not gone away. The continuation of punishment beatings is testimony to that. And, one can be certain, it has also taken part in robberies and other illegalities.
The Official IRA, we were told, went out of existence in 1972. Yet it continued a campaign of murder, counterfeiting, robbery and intimidation for decades afterwards, while its political sister (Sinn Féin The Workers' Party and later the Workers' Party) protested its ignorance of such antics and threatened libel action against anybody who suggested they knew of them.
These paramilitary outfits do not just fade away overnight, nor will the Provisional IRA, whatever Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness might like to happen or might like us to believe. But there are ways of hastening its disappearance, the most crucial being the engagement of Sinn Féin with the police service.
One of the preconditions Sinn Féin has insisted on for its support of the Police Service of Northern Ireland is that the Special Branch be disbanded in its present form. Whatever about Sinn Féin's view, there are good reasons for this to happen.
The Special Branch became a police force within a police force over the decades of the Troubles, operating outside accountability procedures for the police force as a whole. It built its own internal loyalties, developing its special paranoia and worldview. The presence of such a permanent Special Branch is a problem and should be dealt with.
The engagement of Sinn Féin in the police force would be far more significant than its participation in the Stormont executive, because it would copperfasten its acceptance of the state of Northern Ireland (the crucial feature of a State is its exclusive right to use violence to enforce communal decisions).
It would require Sinn Féin to urge its supporters to co-operate fully with the police force by reserving for it the sole prerogative to enforce law and order and by supplying it with whatever information Sinn Féin supporters have on illegality, including, for instance, the illegal storage of arms.
It would also add weight to the declarations made by Gerry Adams and the IRA last October, which have not received enough attention. Gerry Adams said Sinn Féin no longer supported the use of force by any organisation in the pursuit of political ends. The IRA said it agreed.
Since the whole point of the IRA has been the use of force to achieve a political end (i.e., a united Ireland) this was tantamount to saying the game was up, the IRA was no more. Of course it would not work out quite so smoothly but it would be transformative and would serve to end some or almost all of the paramilitarism now associated with the IRA.
So Friday night's alleged attempted abduction is a sideshow, even if it was an IRA operation. Such operations will continue for as long as republicans are not drawn into support for the police service. Indeed they will go on at a muted level even after that but that can be dealt with through normal policing.
Unionists will continue to protest that no party with links to a paramilitary organisation is fit to be a party of government. Yes, that is so in ideal circumstances. But in these circumstances, does it really matter? What advantage would Sinn Féin enjoy through such links in the context of agreement on policing? The advantage of having Sinn Féin tied into the institutions of Northern Ireland far outweighs any incongruity arising from low-level escapades by the IRA.
But back to the main point: the suspicion that the characterisation of the alleged attempted abduction of Bobby Tohill on Friday evening as an IRA operation may be another instance of news manipulation to undermine the peace process. Certainly there is that suspicion over Stormontgate - the dramatic raid on Sinn Féin's Stormont offices in October 2002 with claims that the most sensitive security and political documents had been found, claims now ridiculed by the quiet dropping of the spy-ring charges against Sinn Féin personnel.
Friday evening's happenings raise similar suspicions. The IRA never previously, in its 30-year history, attempted to abduct a person in such a public place. No guns were involved. The attempted abduction took place in close proximity to a police station in the centre of Belfast. The person at the centre of the affair, Bobby Tohill, has given starkly divergent accounts of what happened.
His background would seem to offer a variety of possible explanations for his involvement in a fracas. But most peculiarly, the people charged with his abduction have not been charged with membership of the IRA. If there was clear evidence for the allegation that they were members of the IRA, how come there is not evidence for charges of membership?