Analysis: The offer to shoot McCartney killers speaks to its support base, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor.
What if the sisters and Bridgeen had said yes? Now there's a thought to make you shudder. Not that they would of course: the moral universe they inhabit is the same as the one populated by most of the rest of the island.
The IRA in saying it was prepared to shoot the killers of Robert McCartney was playing to two constituencies: its own, which will make some sense of its statement; and the other - almost everyone else - which found its willingness to engage in summary justice on behalf of the family genuinely shocking and bizarre.
But for its own constituency, for its own republican heartlands, this statement could get the IRA off the hook on which it impaled itself.
Most people not totally familiar with the arcane codes and secret practices of the provisional republican movement will be wondering this morning if the IRA mindset has any attachment to what passes for reality in Ireland.
There is a certain Machiavellian logic to the statement, however. IRA representatives went to the McCartney sisters and Robert's partner, Bridgeen, offering to shoot the four men - two of them senior IRA figures - it says were directly involved in the murder.
In this instance what does "shoot" mean? An IRA member presented the organisation's five-page statement to the BBC's Northern Ireland security correspondent Brian Rowan yesterday.
Rowan asked him was the IRA intending to carry out a so-called punishment shooting or to kill the four men.
The IRA representative wasn't prepared to go beyond the statement. So, we don't know what the IRA meant by shoot.
What we do know is, as we would expect, that the McCartneys didn't want anyone shot in their name. And fortunately for Robert McCartney's alleged killers, the IRA complied with the family's wishes.
So, could the IRA do anything else to get due process justice for the McCartneys? It could. "We have ordered anyone who was present on the night to go forward and to give a full and honest account of their actions," it said in its statement.
"That includes those who have already been subject to the IRA's internal disciplinary proceedings. We are continuing to press all of those involved in the events around the killings of Robert McCartney to come forward," the IRA added.
As far as its support base is concerned the IRA has gone as far as it possibly could in trying to assist the McCartneys.
It couldn't shoot the killers because the family opposed such action. And after all it "ordered" those who saw Robert fatally stabbed to assist.
What more could it do? Ordering witnesses to come forward might or might not work. If they are prepared to accept the assurances of the IRA and provide evidence, then there is a possibility that the killers, one of them an IRA commander of considerable influence, may be convicted of a brutal crime.
But if the witnesses don't provide evidence sustainable in a court of law or, as Catherine McCartney said recently, they come forward but say they "were in the toilet" when the actual stabbing took place, then his killers will stay free.
As everybody knows in the close-knit Short Strand and nearby Markets area, from where some of the witnesses also originate, giving evidence against IRA members, even "court-martialled" members, involves transgressing a powerful law against informing.
The current graffiti in the Short Strand declaring "Jerry (sic) Adams Is A Tout" provides some notion of just how deep that law runs.
People have long memories, a point that the PSNI chief constable, Hugh Orde, recently made when he suggested that retribution could come postdated for breaking the rule of republican omerta.
Maybe people will heed the IRA's exhortations but it's far from certain that they will. And if they don't, well that won't be the IRA's fault as far as most of the republican faithful is concerned.
The organisation will be seen to have done its best, and then some. Thereafter, in such an eventuality, the wagons will be circled and republicans will knuckle down to defend themselves from the inevitable onslaught of criticism that will be fired its way.
But beyond the republican heartland the initial reaction to the statement was one of horror. The charges from the likes of Rev Ian Paisley, the SDLP's Eddie McGrady and others, that the statement was obscene and grotesque generally struck a chord of agreement, notwithstanding protestations from Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly that here was the IRA actually saying it was prepared to co-operate with a judicial system it has always opposed.
The statement raises difficult and profound questions for Gerry Adams and the rest of the Sinn Féin leadership.
Just look back to the weekend ardfheis where Adams expressed his abhorrence of "punishment" attacks and said that republicans recognise a crime when they see one in its "moral and legal sense".
"But we refuse to criminalise those who break the law in pursuit of legitimate political objectives," he added.
Where does the IRA offer to shoot the alleged killers fit in with the Sinn Féin president's qualified "moral and legal" understanding of what constitutes a crime? Or is the offer to shoot the killers a legitimate pursuit of a political objective.
And consider how people have named Sinn Féin figures such as Adams and Martin McGuinness as members of the IRA army council.
In interviews where such allegations are put to McGuinness, he regularly complains that he is denied due process to which, he reasonably says, he is entitled. But where is there any notion of due process in the IRA statement.
We shouldn't really be surprised that the IRA operates and thinks like this, because that is the way it has acted through the Troubles. But if Adams and McGuinness are on the army council you would think they would have the political nous to advise P O'Neill that this statement is going to convey a truth previously hidden to much of the population, that the IRA sees itself above the law because it sees itself as the law.
That's hardly the sort of moral riddle that would attract floating voters to Sinn Féin. But such is the current crisis in republicanism that maybe its first priority is to finesse the McCartney dilemma - which it may or may not have done in its statement - and thereafter, when matters have quietened, to regroup politically. That's not reckoning with the McCartneys though.
After yesterday's statement many people will now be wondering about P O'Neill and his colleagues: on what moral and philosophical planet do you exist?
A query that won't help Sinn Féin as it faces a byelection in the South and Westminster elections in the North.