The IRA is not going to disband. The IRA is not going to end what is called criminal activity, not for now anyway. The IRA may decommission most of its weapons but it will retain some, writes Vincent Browne.
Senior members of Sinn Féin will continue to be involved in the IRA. More than likely there will be some internal rearrangements which will perpetuate the IRA in some other guise, allowing deniability and cover. And for many people, were they to appreciate all that, this would be unacceptable. They would be mistaken.
What matters now is not an IRA statement announcing disbandment or an end to operations or full decommissioning or commitment to solely peaceful methods. There is another test, a far more important test, a test, which, if met, would be truly transformative.
Policing.
Policing has been the big issue for a decade and remains the big issue. Everything else is a ball of smoke. Decommissioning doesn't matter - it never did.
How would anyone know the IRA had decommissioned all its weapons? How would anybody know they didn't acquire more weapons? Ending of criminality, well yes, but do we really expect the few thousand who have been in the IRA, many of whom have been full-time criminals (in the literal sense) for all this time, to be law-abiding henceforth, especially when so much of the rest of society is not law-abiding? Policing is where it is at.
If republicans are tied into policing all other issues fade away. And by being tied in I mean the following: that they give their total support to policing; that they urge their members and supporters and society generally to co-operate with the police force in the prevention and detection of all acts that are against the law (let's not get tangled up in the semantics of criminality - all action, that is, against the law as the law now is, is what matters); that they agree no other organisations have any authority to enforce anything other than the police force and the courts; that "punishment beatings" be reported to the police along with all information on who were involved; that members, supporters and others are urged to give information to the police on all breaches of the law, ie to "inform".
This won't stop criminality, won't stop all "punishment beatings", won't end the IRA as an organisation. But it will or would be transformative for it would mean an acceptance of the democratic institutions of the state, notably the police force, as the sole legitimate institutions, demanding unequivocal allegiance.
Of course there will be fudges and equivocations on this for a while at least - only the appointment of a Sinn Féin minister in charge of security would end the fudges and we would then see a law and order which many of us liberals might not like at all.
Also, there will be criminality on the part of people associated with the republican movement or formerly associated. How could it be otherwise? If Sinn Féin is roped into the policing establishment it will be only a matter of time before all issues of criminality, weapons and subversion are resolved. But there is a problem.
The problem is not so much with the IRA or republicans generally, it is to do with the political culture.
There is a danger that when republicans are found to have engaged in further criminality, the whole process will be discredited because of a failure to appreciate that transformations are not sudden - they take time, lots of time.
The Northern Bank robbery is a case in point. I discussed this with a senior police officer recently, somebody with special knowledge of police intelligence. He was of the view that the robbery was an act of defiance by members of the IRA - not against the political establishment but against the Sinn Féin establishment.
It was a pity that this "intelligence" did not get currency at the time Hugh Orde declared his view that the IRA was responsible for the robbery.
Had it been appreciated that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness certainly were not involved, had no prior knowledge and that the likelihood was that the action was undertaken to defy them, there would have been a very different public and political reaction.
Similarly, when (not if) further actions are taken by people in the republican movement, either for reasons of self enrichment or a sense of public pressure or as another act of defiance against their own leadership, the likelihood is that the process will appear discredited. A consequence of this, for instance, would be the further postponement of the restoration of the power-sharing institutions or, if already established, then the collapse again of those institutions.
It should and must be enough for Sinn Féin to sign up unequivocally to policing, and for as long as they remain signed up without reservation then that should be that.