As I write this, I have no way of knowing if the peace process is about to collapse, or if it will limp on towards its next appointment with the inevitable. The European Elections, in which Ian Paisley was again the most popular politician in Northern Ireland, should have reminded us that it is impossible to reconcile loyalists and armed republicans in shared institutions; yet still this tragic farce of the peace process, which has created an extraordinary climate, politically unrealistic yet morally coercive - to dissent is to want war - mesmerises us all about that very same, perfectly preposterous ambition.
Our desire for peace, our disgust with violence, our despair at the depravity which Northern Ireland seems to pluck out of the skies almost at will, has stopped most of us from thinking clearly. We wanted to be decent and fair, and so we went down the path of trying to accommodate the unaccommodatable, of mixing fire and water in the same crucible, and expecting both to survive.
Final settlement
All the evidence of our senses told this was impossible, but we were bewitched by the prospect of a final settlement in which the base metal of the evil of 30 years could be transformed by the philosopher's stone of sweet reason into the gold of lasting peace. What vanity drove us to believe that? What neglect of enduring and undeniable truths, evident across Europe this century, led us to believe we were a blessed people, immune to the laws which govern human hearts everywhere?
Since the collapse of the great empires of Europe, once reviled - Ottoman, Hapsburg, Romanov, now standing as masterpieces of tolerance and political ingenuity - Europe's nation states have dealt harshly with their minorities. Across the continent, people have been expelled from or murdered in home-places inhabited by their ancestors for centuries. That lethal creation, the nation state, has, since the implementation of the dementedly wishful Wilson principles from 1919 onwards, been an instrument of racism, murder and exclusion right across Europe.
Dominance or expulsion: that has been the abominable norm. But nobody tried the impossible trick, attempted by the creators of Northern Ireland, of creating a state containing a hostile population half the size of the dominant community. Such a challenge is not achievable without recourse to draconian state powers or vast and compulsory expulsions. And this would have been much the same, with mildly different arithmetic, had an undivided, self-governing Ireland tried to incorporate the unionists of Ulster against their will.
Disloyal to state
We know that a very great part of the unionist population of what is now the Republic fled anyway, or were chased out, after 1921 - a fact which nationalist historians have either ignored or sneeringly dismissed as West-Brit flag-following. But of course, nationalists who were disloyal to the state within which they involuntarily found themselves were being true to themselves: unionists similarly placed were being simply treacherous.
To incorporate two identities is hard enough; to incorporate those who revere the gun as well is simply impossible. You cannot propitiate two sets of extremes and the centre simultaneously.
For this we know: the high-wire act and the elephant dance cannot be performed alongside the underwater circus escape. Yet we wanted to see the three together, and in our corporate witlessness, began to create an arena in which the three would perform simultaneously, side by side.
This witlessness was so contagious that in recent months I too succumbed to the dangerously seductive pieties of peace: might I have been wrong all along? Might everyone soon not hold hands? Might not my utter loathing of everything about the IRA - its delight in murder, its ceaseless victimhood-whingeing, its grotesque retinue of lick-spittle cheerleaders in the media and elsewhere - have confused my thinking? Maybe the peace process could work after all. . .
Suckered, suckered entirely by the last hurrah of 1970s Coke-ad political philosophy: "I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony. . ." For the basis of the "peace process" is no more than the risible Woodstock school of applied ethics finding its last bedraggled roosting-place in a few bloodied counties in Ireland.
Who to blame?
Who is to blame for this moral catastrophe? We, us - those who did not close down the IRA within this State. The occasions for doing so were supplied in plenty by the IRA - the murder of Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the massacre of the Mountbatten boating party, the Brighton bombing, Enniskillen, White Cross - but there was no coherent, determined response from the State. Dev or Sean Lemass would have snuffed the Provos out in a trice.
We have bent the rules of law and of civilisation itself to rescue Mr Adams from the failure of his self-ordained task of overthrowing the Northern Ireland state. It doesn't work. You cannot contain the hedgehog of the IRA within the soft tissues of democratic institutions without doing terrible damage to the host. Already the policy of appeasement is boosting Sinn Fein electorally: it is now on a par with Fine Gael in certain parts of the country.
Where we go from here I do not know: all I am sure of is that the crisis averted by midnight today is crisis deferred until the last desperate collapse of this vast folly; and, unless we are very lucky indeed, beyond that folly lies a vale of tears.