The most extraordinary thing about the IRA's statement last week is that it shows how much joy has been drained out of the peace process, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Here was a moment of immense historical resonance, the end of a conspiratorial movement that had lasted for almost 150 years since the foundation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
By any standards, the political achievement of Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and their allies in dismantling an undefeated terrorist organisation from the inside is colossal. Getting a tightly-knit group of ideological zealots, whose self-righteousness has proved itself so impervious to shame and reason, to face the logic of its own extinction required intelligence, courage and cunning of a very high degree.
Last May, the International Monitoring Commission on terrorism in Northern Ireland remarked in its report that, if Adams delivered on the promise of his public appeal to the IRA the previous month, he would "have demonstrated leadership of a high order". It would be churlish to withhold such recognition now.
So why was the moment, when it came, so anti-climactic? Why, beyond the realms of a media world delighted to have a story to fill space in the silly season, was the general feeling such a sour compound of boredom, scepticism and apathy? Some of the reasons are obvious enough. People know news management when they see it, and the staging of this event has been painfully transparent.
Since last April, when Adams made his speech in the course of an election campaign and at the height of public anger over the Northern Bank robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney, every last drop of juicy PR has been wrung from the charade of Gerry and Martin consulting with themselves about the decision.
This in turn was in keeping with the mixture of tedium and titillation that has marked the decade since the IRA announced a supposedly "complete" end to its armed campaign. The IRA's death has been like that of an operatic heroine writhing around in increasingly self-indulgent contortions, staggering to her feet for yet another tragic aria before finally expiring in an ecstasy of self-pity.
More profoundly, however, there is a sense of unacknowledged futility. The decision to wind itself up is accompanied by neither intellectual nor moral insight. There is no recognition that, at the very least, the last 20 years of the IRA's campaign was politically counter-productive, no acceptance that a political settlement based on violent coercion was as unattainable as it would have been unsustainable. There is no remorse, no pity, no shame.
The meanly laconic acknowledgment that "many people suffered in the conflict" is cancelled out by the insistence that "the armed struggle was entirely legitimate". Note the "entirely" and what it includes - torturing and murdering civilians and depriving their families of a decent burial; incinerating the dog-lovers of the Irish Collie club at the La Mon hotel; blowing to bits those honouring the dead of two world wars at Enniskillen; the massacres at Kingsmills, Birmingham, Teebane Cross and the Shankill Road; the murders of children such as Paul Maxwell, Nicholas Knatchbull, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry.
Even atrocities that the IRA itself admitted at the time were indefensible (in relation to La Mon, for example, the IRA accepted at the time that it was "rightly and sincerely criticised" are now included in the moral amnesty it has graciously granted to itself.
At the root of this refusal to engage with the reality of its own campaign is the egotism that attaches to a conspiratorial elite. The demented self-importance of a gang that believed itself to be the government of Ireland has not gone away and is evident in last week's statement.
Nearly all the commentary on the statement neglected to mention that a draft of what it should say had been put forward by the Irish and British governments as part of the abortive talks last December.
That draft included a very carefully calibrated formulation that had obviously been tested and found to be acceptable to both governments and to the other parties in Northern Ireland. It stated that the IRA would accept the "need not to endanger anyone's personal rights or safety".
It was a simple, comprehensive and straightforward phrase and one that must surely be acceptable to any organisation committed to furthering a political goal exclusively through peaceful and democratic means.
It would have cost the IRA absolutely nothing to have used this formula of words, and doing so would have provided important reassurance to everyone else.
Why was it not used? Because, presumably, of a childish petulance, a stubborn and solipsistic refusal to accommodate anyone else's needs.
And so, a long history of conspiratorial republicanism comes to an end, not with a bang but with a self-regarding whim. There is nothing eloquent, no sense of grandeur, no epic moment of historical, emotional or moral truth.
And in that at least, the IRA's departure is in keeping with its presence over the last 35 years - a small and sordid rebuke to the vainglorious rhetoric that sustained it.