Out tumbles yet more tangled and sour-smelling baggage of a dirty war: "Stakeknife", Brian Nelson, the British army's Force Research Unit, the IRA's "Nutting Squad".
Solid ground turns treacherous. IRA "executioners" winked at by British spy-masters, UDA gunmen fooled into killing an elderly man in his bed to preserve an IRA double-agent: a spill of unverifiable detail makes the head swim. But the central implication is devastating, and simple.
Archbishop Eames said it on Tuesday at the opening of the Church of Ireland Synod: ". . . as a human being I resent deeply that a life could have been saved and was not . . . there are rules beyond which we should not go." From a man who has faced the accusation within his own church that he equivocates about the damage it suffers through association with the Orange Order, and the charge that he aligns Anglicanism in Ireland too readily with political unionism, this was strong and timely comment.
By contrast with the archbishop's distress, unionist political voices offered unconditional approval for everything a secret army unit might have allowed, encouraged or directed a "Stakeknife" to do. On this issue David Trimble, Jeffrey Donaldson and Sammy Wilson sounded identical, not a trace of unease among them. Archbishop Eames may have heartened other Northern Protestants, a questioning but reticent part of the community ill-served by the monotone of political leaders.
In his formal address to the synod, Dr Eames was more politic. Catholics/nationalists should recognise that there were no second-class citizens and accept the good will in the Protestant community, "which like their's has made mistakes in the past".
Protestants/unionists must find new confidence and be "allowed to move away from the siege mentality": others could help by their attitudes, pronouncements and actions. But he was forthright in observing that, while the Protestant/unionist community demanded clarity of others, they needed to recognise "how far Irish nationalism and republicanism have moved".
There are moments when debates in private break into the light. At some points the archbishop could have been meditating aloud on A Long Peace - the Future of Unionism in Northern Ireland, a chunky pamphlet published last week. Trevor Ringland, the former Irish rugby international now chiefly known as advocate of more positive Ulster Unionism, works with two England-based colleagues to encourage unionist debate, originally by posting comments on a website called Slugger O'Toole.
A Long Peace draws on discussions in various parts of Northern Ireland and interviews with unionists of various shades, academics, commentators, a republican, a nationalist and others. Tactful, even tenderly respectful of unionist sensitivities, the result is also a sparky and curious read. The primary intention, apparently, was to convincingly depict "a possible future Northern Ireland through unionist eyes". One of those involved said: "It poses the question - what if the siege is lifted? What if the enemies aren't out to get us after all?" At points the language of the pamphlet is similarly heightened, almost theatrical or evangelical. Today's unionists inherit "an entrepreneurial, iconoclastic and vibrant tradition", honour sacrifice and devotion to duty, its most recent public manifestation the policemen who lived under constant threat from republican paramilitaries.
The Rev John Dunlop is quoted: "It is difficult to imagine how every murder shook the Protestant community like a tremor." But reconstruction of civic society allows them to celebrate survival and honour the sacrifices made. "As they reach back into their traditions, they must speak more forcefully of liberty, but with a new understanding of the obligations liberty brings."
It is an argument laid out more flatly in another treatment of unionism's possible future. Cutting with the grain - Policy and the Protestant community: What is to be done? is a stinging submission to Secretary of State Paul Murphy by one of the most resilient individuals in local politics, Independent Labour councillor, Mark Langhammer. Langhammer has built a solid vote by community work since teenage in one of the bleakest loyalist districts, the north Belfast suburb of Rathcoole. Policing is undermined, he writes, because "the use of agents within loyalist groups by police and state agencies has involved organised, effectively state, murder such as in the Finucane case".
Wishful NIO schemes to regenerate the grassroots funnel money into "dissolute and degenerate loyalist paramilitarism". Instead, he recommends support for "national charitable bodies or via the two main civilising bodies in Protestant civil society, the churches and the trade union movement". Since he also points out the weakness of churches and trade unionism, this sounds like a counsel of despair. Indeed both pro- and anti-agreement unionists add to despondency by "relentless patter about concessions" to nationalism, Langhammer says. "Mainstream unionism has turned its back on its working-class voter fodder."
A different take on unionism - another glimpse of life after the siege?