Madam, - Those who, in the aftermath of decommissioning, looked forward to hearing some fresh ideas from Sinn Féin/IRA as to how it intends to advance its cause by the promised exclusively peaceful means must be already experiencing disappointment.
To paraphrase Churchill, now that the smoke and dust of the destroyed weapons have cleared away, we see the dreary steeples of traditional republican rhetoric emerging once again. First, there was the nasty coat-trailing exercise through the streets of Dublin on the weekend before last, with the brave volunteers seeking to reassure the rest of us as to their non-violent intentions by shouldering replica rifles and wearing paramilitary regalia. Exactly how many of those needing to be convinced were won over to the cause of a united Ireland by the facile slogan "Make Partition History" - which was also insulting to the anti-poverty campaign of recent months?
Then came a revival of the stale and bankrupt ideology which for almost three decades underpinned the futile war waged, to such counter-productive effect, by the republicans. Twelve years after the assurance in the Downing Street Declaration - that Britain had "no selfish strategic or economic interest" in staying in Ulster - was supposed to have induced Sinn Féin/IRA to call its first ceasefire, the Sinn Féin MP Conor Murphy tells a fringe meeting at Labour's Brighton conference that "the core problem remains Britain's involvement in Irish affairs" (The Irish Times, September 29th). The rest of us had assumed that the declaration meant that Britain was henceforth neutral as between nationalism and unionism - itself a bitter pill for most unionists to swallow - and that the core problem was nationalism's "British Question": how to win the consent of a million people of British identity in Ireland.
Seven years after Sinn Féin signed up to acceptance of the "principle of consent" in the Belfast Agreement, Mr Murphy drags out the old warhorse that the British government "should start persuading unionists" that their interests lie in a united Ireland. In other words, the hated traditional enemy is asked to lean on our deluded "fellow Irishmen" to enlighten them as to where their true interests lie.
These threadbare doctrines are just what Northern Ireland needs to keep sectarian tensions close to boiling point and undermine any chance of success for a revived assembly and executive under the Agreement.
There is no true nationalist who would not welcome a united Ireland achieved some day by genuine consent, but constitutional nationalists must dissociate themselves from the new policy of Maximum Irritation of Unionists which appears to be the best that SF can offer as replacement for the failed armed strategy.
Instead, the party should take seriously the opinions expressed in Dick Keane's excellent letter of September 29th on the need for nationalists to do everything possible to remove the sense of siege felt in the unionist community.
If they compliantly allow themselves to be led by Sinn Féin's predatory form of nationalism, the future may be as bleak as the recent past. - Yours etc.,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.