The prospect of another power-sharing Stormont is dead for the foreseeable future.
As the fallout from the Belfast bank robbery settles like bomb debris, contaminating the surroundings, some consequences are clear. Unionists now have a veto with which both governments entirely sympathise. Next time, republicans will pay a higher price for a deal.
As always, condemnation has rallied the conspiratorial republican world to generate spin and denial. The vehemence, and the sense of disarray, suggests that the consequences are not popular. But the conspiracists cannot and will not blame the IRA. Who profits, they ask. The line parroted in public and entertained at length in private is the long history of security force dirty tricks. Case closed: it was not the IRA who dun it. Never mind that republican street talk gloated that it did, until police chief Hugh Orde named it as chief suspect.
But for all the wrath at police searches, and in spite of apparently well-founded scepticism about the PSNI's intelligence, Orde is not a satisfactory villain. Even the most slavish admirer of Sinn Féin leaders has an uncomfortably recent memory of Gerry Adams and Gerry Kelly trooping in to meet the chief constable, politeness all round; a complimentary Orde remark about "your leaders" and "we can do business" stuff from Kelly. Hard to wipe that from the memory bank and replace with the old loathing for the RUC.
In one recent television interview, Martin McGuinness said "RUC" throughout when talking about today's police. It was scarcely a serious point. The case can be made that Orde has been almost laughably supportive of the republican leadership, who were on the verge of returning the compliment and signing up to begin the process of supporting the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
As the dust settles, other underlying realities show through.The scale of the bank robbery and its timing were what caused upheaval, but a series of less spectacular similar crimes before it, mostly in the North, have been attributed fairly convincingly to the IRA. And, as Bertie Ahern pointed out in the Dáil most forcibly on Wednesday, over the past fortnight, in districts where the IRA is by far the most likely to carry out "punishment" attacks, a number of people have been shot and maimed - after a long lull in such shootings. Clearly there was a decision to stop, and another, in the middle of outrage at the robbery, to restart.
To the outsider, the message is a cynical "as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb". The cooler response recognises that none of this constitutes a radical departure, that youths tied up and shot through the hands is only a manifestation of unchanged local dynamics. There is constant communal pressure for harsh action against those deemed guilty of petty crime. During negotiations, punishment squads had orders to stay quiet. Now all bets are off.
The IRA does what it does. It has wound down "military operations". It is nowhere near being wound up. The league of the wishful-thinking (including this writer) has been reminded that the only rules republicans play by are their own, and that talk of a gradual transformation into an old soldiers' association may have been no more than talk. "The 'Army' is the core," says a clear-eyed student of republican evolution. "How do you wind up your core?" Informed assessment of the relative importance of "Army" and Sinn Féin has always recognised that the political party is the subordinate.
"The decision to go into politics was an Army decision." But even this unillusioned outsider tends to think the rules of the wider political world must prevail in the name of progress: "If the IRA can't evolve completely into Sinn Féin, and disappear, the reformers have to leave." Do they? Perhaps not, at least not in order to retain credibility with voters, as polls and elections demonstrate. Will the growing pattern of transfers from other parties continue? The Meath by-election will be one test.
For the duration of the Troubles, northerners of all stripes accepted that nationalists had a limited concept of criminality, since most thought the state illegitimate, but that the IRA had to behave differently in the Republic. It has been clear for some time that the growing section of the electorate that vote for Sinn Féin barely register continuing paramilitarism in the North and blink at occasional IRA crime in their own State.
For all the anger that republicans demanded the early release of the killers of Jerry McCabe, they prospered politically after the IRA killed him.
The voters may sicken eventually. Some republicans may still think they can advance with the ballot box in one hand, gun in the other, swag over the shoulder and the proceeds of business, shady and otherwise, stuffed in their pockets.
But not towards Stormont.