It is doubtful if anyone in the negotiations leading to the Belfast Agreement expected that the paramilitaries would march up to the gates of RUC barracks throughout the North to stack their weapons in neat piles for destruction. Only the very naive would have believed it likely, for example, that the IRA would leave itself without a doomsday option. A cache of Armalites would be held here, a box of ammunition there, to enable it to strike back in the event of a breakdown of the ceasefires.
But what was not anticipated was that the IRA, as the largest and most threatening paramilitary group, would refuse to acknowledge any necessity of reducing the stockpile of weaponry in its hands; that it would refuse to consider a timetable for the elimination of that stockpile; that it would insist that it will never decommission; or that it is unwilling to make a clear declaration that its violence is ended.
It was not anticipated with two seats earmarked on the new executive for Sinn Fein, with the prisons virtually empty, with a commission reviewing policing, with an inquiry into the criminal justice system and with a dramatic reduction in security, that not an ounce of semtex - quintessentially an offensive, rather than a defensive weapon - would be disposed of.
It is not the failure to fully disarm at this point which must keep the IRA and its Sinn Fein associates outside of the democratic consensus. It is the brazen insistence that they will have it both ways indefinitely and without compromise. Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness demand full democratic rights in the executive while their paramilitary affiliates not only hold on to their guns but repeatedly declare their intention of doing so sine die. The people of Ireland are offered their new, agreed arrangements on extraordinary terms; if they do not work out to the satisfaction of Sinn Fein and the IRA they will retain the option of the gun.
Mr McGuinness says he cannot make the IRA decommission its weapons. At the same time he says that General de Chastelain is satisfied that Sinn Fein has discharged its obligations under the Agreement - although it will be noted that the general has made no such public affirmation. Almost 10 months after the signing, Mr McGuinness says he is powerless to persuade the IRA to take even one step towards the objective which must be fully attained by spring of next year. What has Sinn Fein been doing over the past three years if it has not been representing the IRA dimension of its own persona? What is its significance - beyond that of any other minority agglomeration of votes - if it cannot bring with it the paramilitary organisation of which it is the political obverse?
The IRA is well able to come to Sinn Fein when it wants something itself. It appears to have no difficulty in mobilising Sinn Fein support and advocacy when its members find themselves looking at long prison sentences. Yet Mr McGuinness and Mr Adams seem to be unable to put a persuasive case to their paramilitary colleagues without the risk of causing a split in the "Republican family". The only way forward, they insist, is for the executive to be brought into being, with its members holding office as Ministers while their associates beat, maim and torture on the streets and while their private army reserves the right to resume the use of its weaponry.
To insist that this must not be allowed to happen is not to call into question the validity of the peace process or to urge any revision of the Agreement, as some commentators have chosen to interpret recent argument in these columns. It is to recognise that democracy, if it is to claim that name, must have a bottom line and that those who claim to abide by its principles - and to benefit from them - must accept that bottom line. Sinn Fein is but a dangerous and self-deluding fraud if it signed up last May, hoping to secure political power while its alter ego will neither start to disarm nor declare that its use of force is irrevocably at an end.