So Bill Clinton's autobiography relates that after the Omagh bombing the Taoiseach assured him the IRA had warned the Real IRA that if they did anything like that again, "the British police would be the least of their worries". Good, says Kevin Myers. Indeed, excellent.
So here we have the elected first Minister of this Republic talking as if rule of "law" would now be imposed not by the authorities of this State, nor indeed by the British, but by terrorists.
Except, of course, by that time, the PIRA had become a standing army allowed to remain alongside the security forces of the Republic. The Good Friday Agreement - which I confess, in a moment of cretinous, weepy weakness, I welcomed - effectively authorised the IRA to remain in existence, armed, ready and recruiting.
Now at its most basic, this agreement is unconstitutional and violates all the central duties of a state. But when did this State ever pretend it was even adhering to the central principles which define statehood? These concern the obligation to defend its borders, to punish its wrong-doers, and to have a monopoly on the use of force in protection of itself, its laws and its citizens. Real states crack down on those who attempt to subvert their authority. We did no such thing: instead we hid behind what was designed to be a fearless instrument of state against terrorism, the Special Criminal Court; but left to lawyers, this became an utterly contemptible forum specialising in a diseased and legalistic pedantry. Meanwhile terrorists, weeping with hysterical laughter, sauntered free through its doors, and homeward to their bomb-making classes.
This was not tolerable, but at least the failure to confront terrorism seriously could hide behind the fig-leaf of law. No such excuse can be made when an elected prime minister assures an elected president that if one group of terrorists breaks an international agreement, they will answer not to the forces of his state, but to a rival terrorist organisation. That constitutes the formal surrender by the Government over the rule of "law", and its arrogation by terrorists: game, set and match to the Shinners.
Clinton appears to have been entertained by the prospect of the IRA enforcing the Good Friday Agreement on dissidents, though he would have been less pleased by its domestic equivalent - the Michigan Militia, say, taking over law enforcement in Detroit. Did he declare that this seemed a very bad thing indeed? Of course not. He is, after all, the "I did not have sex with that woman" president of the US, a man who resorts to truth only when he is no longer inventive enough to lie - at which points he reverts to the Aw Gee Shucks Mom mode of a guileful, wayward, teenage boy.
Here in Ireland, it's different. We're dealing with the future of our country. And what is the main governing party, Fianna Fáil, getting exercised about? Is it concerned about the growth of Sinn Féin, towing its private army not far in its wake, in working-class constituencies across the country? Is it consistently and repeatedly attacking Sinn Féin for its paramilitary connections? Indeed not: on these things it is abjectly silent.
Instead it attacks the PD Minister for Justice, blaming his belief in the "free market" for its own electoral reverses. But Michael McDowell has made no such recent declarations on the virtues of the market. All his recent, strongly worded statements have been attacks on Sinn Féin, and its criminal, paramilitary associations. In other words, the allegations about his arrogant free marketism are simply coded Fianna Fáil warnings: don't let's be beastly to the Shinners.
This is stupidity, mixed with cowardice, and blended with snake-in-the-grass, sneaking-regardism - the certain outcome of which will be the defeat of Fianna Fáil within much of its traditional working-class and small town constituencies. For Fianna Fáil to protect Sinn Féin is like the sparrow protecting the young cuckoo. The SDLP did exactly the same thing in the North, a craven capitulation which was hailed - and still is - by peace process cheerleaders as "statesmanship". The reward for such statesmanship? SDLP fledglings lie dead beneath the bough; and if Mark Durcan wants to meet Bertie Ahern or Tony Blair, he joins the shuffling queue behind pensioners from Accrington and farmers from Athy, while Gerry Adams is a phone call away from instant access.
Sinn Féin-IRA have embarked upon the journey towards power North and South. Their suited zealots are everywhere, their eyes shining with a mad Moonie gleam, uttering smooth, meaningless Shinner-speak about hospitals and housing, just as the Nazis did in Germany in the early days.
In 1927, after election results comparable with Sinn Féin's recent successes, the Weimar Minister for the Interior blithely dismissed the Nazis as "a numerically insignificant, radical revolutionary splinter group incapable of exerting any noticeable influence on the great mass of the population and the course of political events." Six years later, aided by an international economic collapse, the Nazis were in power, their paramilitary wing now attacking dissenters.
Is the only defence we are to muster against a similar Sinn Féin-IRA takeover in Ireland within a comparable period - by, say, 2010 - a phenomenon over which we have no control, namely the health of the world economy? Because at the moment, Fianna Fáil is merely watching as Sinn Féin-IRA busily lay their eggs in its traditional heartlands. And what initially sounds like "cuckoo" soon becomes "sieg heil". Then, by God, the Shinners' day will really have come.