The Mitchell Principles; ah yes, the Mitchell Principles - now who, pray, remembers them? These principles not merely insisted on participants in all-party talks renouncing the use or threat of violence, but also declared that, during the talks process, arms be surrendered. This was the central principle which enabled the talks process to begin; and it is a central principle which has failed to gain the surrender of so much as a single halberd.
In other words, the talks are an illusion, a sham, sustained only by the lack of political courage on all sides to state the obvious. Yet again the emperor is naked; but even to advert to this is to invite accusations of being a nay-saying Paisleyite or, most bizarrely, of being a tool of MI5 - apparently on the astonishing grounds that MI5 likes the idea of the IRA levelling London again.
Now I admit that the Government can't just say it's going to pull out of the Stormont talks simply because they are a waste of time. Few things would be more catastrophic than an abject renunciation of a policy which has hitherto been a central and unquestioned piety within the politics of nationalist Ireland.
Final settlement
These things must be done slowly; but they will not be done painlessly. We must live with the legacy bequeathed to us by the heresy that there is such a thing as a final settlement, and we must slowly undo the wholly unreal and deeply dangerous expectations that have been aroused by the entire Hume-Adams initiative.
Aside from creating absurd hopes, that initiative has done two other things. It has, to be sure, temporarily stopped the violence and enabled "talks" to begin - but we can see how frail that cessation of violence actually was, for after months of non-talking talks, nothing has been achieved. And, catastrophically, it has come close to bringing the SDLP to the point of electoral extinction. Indeed, the triumph of Sinn Fein among Northern nationalists is the most likely long-term outcome of the Hume-Adams axis. That is very pretty; very pretty indeed.
But we cannot simply abandon the talks process, particularly now, with the gunmen back on the streets and the coffins once again being prepared. So the committee to discuss the manufacture of the unflyable airliner, the Eirespatiale Drumlin, with its lead wings and concrete fuselage and cast-iron tailplane, in which the population of Northern Ireland will fly off to its new and peaceful future, must still meet. It will continue its discussions as to whether there should be one swimming pool or two in first class, and whether jacuzzis will be freely available in the leisure centres for passengers flying steerage, much as, I suppose, the Ministry of Interplanetary Travel regularly convenes in downtown Kigali to discuss Rwanda's plans to conquer Saturn and Jupiter.
Survival instinct
It means nothing. We learnt the truth before, and then we ignored it. The truth is this. Northern Ireland is a society which can be unhinged by two lunatics and a dog in a bedsitter. It was unhinged by Gusty Spence and his lunatics just over 30 years ago. It was unhinged over Christmas with the murder of Billy Wright by three men who belong to an organisation in which possession of even the vestige of a survival instinct is an absolute a bar to membership; and which does not lack recruits.
The margins of society in Northern Ireland are teeming with murderous young Napoleons ready to rescue their tribe from betrayal. Is it not clear that the only settlement which can bring peace in this Bonapartist madhouse is a settlement of no-settlement, in which arrangements of compromise and accommodation are informal and spontaneous, rather than in a great Treaty with a flourish of trumpets and gold pens?
But of course this is to deny the primacy of politics, and no politician enters political life in order to declare it impotent - even though in Northern Ireland politics is not so much impotent as counter-productive; the normal machinery of problem-solving is in this case the very problem which has to be solved.
Murderous impulses
This is not to say everything that has happened in recent years is in vain. We should be grateful that the present IRA leadership has - for the moment anyway - tamed those murderous impulses which have soaked us in blood and shame and suffering for nearly three decades; but those ambitions to make the boundaries of Ireland contiguous with the perceived boundaries of the Irish tribe, by force of arms - well, they haven't gone away you know. And nor, as we have seen, is the instinct which declares that the only good Taig is a dead Taig.
No deal can be struck between the Napoleons of the LVF, the INLA, the IRA, the UFF. Not one of those organisations has offered up a penknife in the way of decommissioning; yet if you remember, the issue of decommissioning was the primary obstacle to substantive talks. What conclusion, therefore, can we reach?
The only conclusion is this: the Stormont talks are not substantive talks. They will come to nothing; not because the delegates failed, but because the project was doomed. The Eirespatiale Drumlin is stuck on the ground. There will be no flight to a bright new future, only a dreary slog on foot through jungles of misunderstanding, negotiated with daily improvisation and hourly accommodation. Hope for more, and a vale of tears awaits you this spring.