Thanks to mad, bad and dangerous behaviour last Friday on the Falls Road, the IRA is once again the focus of political manoeuvres in the least flattering way.
A development which republicans who favour the peace process could not have wanted, it comes at a moment of frustrating contrasts.
Ian Paisley's DUP has been setting up scenarios which could see them sharing power with Sinn Féin; loyalist paramilitaries, not the IRA, are clearly, measurably guilty of most violence in Northern Ireland and have been for several years; and Sinn Féin has settled into position as prime representative of nationalist opinion.
Even the form that recriminations about the Falls has taken points up the new, still shifting climate. As one tiring reporter said: "The DUP mayor of Coleraine welcomes Bertie Ahern to the town? Too much. I can't keep up."
David Trimble says he will walk out of the review of the agreement unless Tony Blair takes action against Sinn Féin.
But Ian Paisley, who only months ago fulminated against Mr Trimble for staying in the process - though his party stayed in too - retorts that although of course they will not speak to Sinn Féin/IRA inside the review, the DUP will not be walking.
Indeed, he uses the explanation for staying that Mr Trimble gave in the first place for entering negotiations with Sinn Féin; that in any confrontation with republicanism, his party will be there to represent unionists.
Just before that cinematic incident of police in hot pursuit ramming a van, the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland laid out his belief that loyalists, and in particular the UDA, were responsible for major and continuing violence.
A press conference by fumbling frontmen for the UDA to mark a year of "paramilitary inactivity" had the main news outlets scoffing and pointing out that the year had been filled with their violence.
While the Falls controversy continued to simmer, a group of Protestant parents asked angrily why the unionist politicians, so loudly denouncing Sinn Féin and the IRA, had made no such fuss about the other main loyalist group, the UVF, unlike the UDA supposedly still on ceasefire but responsible for killing their sons. The father of John Allen, shot last November in loyalist Ballyclare, Co Antrim, accused unionists of double standards. "They weren't jumping up and down when my son was killed," he said. "They should have been."
The sequence of events bore out what most in Northern Ireland know but some will not admit. Loyalist groups continue to kill and maim, their victims other Protestants but also Catholics, as though in a vacuum. The politicians who represent their shared community said throughout the Troubles that loyalists killed because of the IRA, that their violence was "reactive". Now they mention them only as an afterthought to constant complaint about the IRA.
Yet police figures show that loyalist paramilitary beatings and "punishment" shootings are twice as frequent as those by republicans of any stripe. The loyalist pipe-bombing of Catholic targets over several recent years has no republican parallel in spread and duration.
Despite occasional unionist attempts to distort the picture, police confirm that it is not the IRA which peddles drugs but loyalists and some dissident republicans.
The IRA, tied so intimately and durably to Sinn Féin, has been responsible for a death in each of the past three years: three deaths too many, none of them justifiable.
Compared to the loyalist record, however, they do indeed look increasingly inactive. But they still exist, and while they do there will continue to be embarrassing and sometimes shameful, bloodstained reappearances.
An Phoblacht has now solemnly reported "a source speaking on behalf of the leadership of the IRA" to the effect that "the IRA did not authorise any action against Bobby Tohill".
This weekend's ardfheis will hear much synthetic indignation. The "securocrat" demons, almost faded from the lexicon, will be blamed for dirty tricks.
There will be mockery of the unionists and heavy sarcasm about Hugh Orde for his "rush to judgment" in fingering the IRA. But the rational element in a paranoid organisation must be wishing horrible vengeance on their armed wing.
Those who vote for Sinn Féin in steadily increasing numbers accept that violent republicanism is on the way out, and live with the contradictions as facts of life, some less palatable than others; like the emergence of Ian Paisley as prime spokesman for unionism.
The purpose of the peace process was to seduce paramilitaries into politics. Nobody involved thought it would be clean and finite. The judgment on the ground is that it is gradually working with the Provos but not with loyalists. Republicans have only themselves to blame when that focus is blurred.