Weapons were valuable bargaining chips for Sinn Féin but had outlived their worth, writes Ed Moloney.
In the wake of yesterday's decommissioning press conference in Belfast it is worth remembering that when John de Chastelain's name was being floated by the British government way back in the winter of 1995 as a contender for chairman of the new Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), the reaction of the then Irish government and the Provisional leadership bordered on panic.
The retired Canadian general had so many strikes against him from an Irish nationalist viewpoint that Dublin and the Provos recruited Bill Clinton's assistance in trying to get him replaced.
Not only was he a Canadian of Scottish ancestry, and thereby regarded by some as both half-British and half-loyalist, but both his parents had worked during the second World War for British intelligence - his father as an MI6 agent in eastern Europe and the Middle East and his mother on the payroll of Sir William Stephenson, Britain's legendary New York-based spymaster.
How, asked the Provos and their friends in the Dublin government, could such a character be anything but biased in favour of the British and unionists and against the IRA when his work overseeing IRA decommissioning would inevitably bring him into friendly contact with his parents' old spooky colleagues and now the IRA's bitter foes?
Only with the greatest foreboding were their objections finally dropped.
Ten years on the Provos and the Irish Government have nothing but praise for de Chastelain and those early doubts about his impartiality, when recalled nowadays, are met with uncomprehending glares. Instead it is the unionists who rage on about the former Canadian soldier. The reasons were all on show once again in the Culloden Hotel yesterday as they have been at each of the general's three prior performances in front of Ireland's media: the refusal to reveal by what method IRA arms had been put permanently beyond use or reach and a rejection of demands that an inventory of decommissioned weapons be published for all to see.
Indeed the general went further yesterday by revealing that not even the British and Irish governments will get the IRA inventory until all paramilitary arms have been decommissioned, including those of the UDA and the UVF. It promises to be a long wait.
The issue of the secrecy that surrounds decommissioning is not just about the public's right to know. It is also about creating unionist trust in the peace process and the intentions of the IRA in particular. And this is not just an academic matter either. Dissembling - or creative ambiguity as the governments prefer to call it - is the defining feature of the Irish peace process and no-one practises it more assiduously than the IRA and their political spokespersons, as the recent Northern Bank raid and murder of Robert McCartney demonstrated.
Add that to a natural, almost genetic disposition on the part of unionism not to believe anything that comes from the mouths of the IRA and Sinn Féin and a conviction that the credulity of outsiders like Gen de Chastelain when dealing with the IRA is infinite and the result is what we have seen over the last four or five years - a decommissioning process of insufficient clarity and transparency to support a stable and evolving political settlement.
Despite an above-par performance from the general yesterday and the recruitment of two clerics as independent witnesses - only one of whom, the Rev Harold Good, has a chance of being believed beyond the thin ranks of Protestant ecumenics - there is little doubt that the general unionist scepticism about decommissioning will persist.
Those who hope that yesterday's press conference will stimulate an early revival of the Belfast Agreement are almost certainly in for a disappointment.
So how did all this come about? Why is it that the Irish decommissioning process, in contrast to others such as those in central America, is so shrouded in secrecy and subterfuge?
One simple, although incomplete answer is that it is so because Gen de Chastelain allowed it to be so - hence unionist frustration with and nationalist approval of his efforts to date.
Under the terms of the decommissioning legislation passed in London and Dublin and the accompanying regulations, the head of the IICD has considerable leeway when it comes to making things public or not.
He is allowed to keep things confidential but is not bound to do so. The arrangement which yesterday saw the modality of decommissioning and the audit of destroyed weapons kept secret is not the product of law but of a voluntary agreement reached between the general and the IRA's representative.
Gen de Chastelain amplified this yesterday: "If we didn't have confidentiality we wouldn't have had any [ decommissioning] events much less this one," he declared, adding that "they [ the IRA] made it clear to us that openness wouldn't happen".
So from the general's viewpoint secrecy was a vital part of the process without which the IRA would never have co-operated.
The conventional explanation for this is that the way IRA decommissioning was conceived, the fact that it would be voluntary, carried out by the IRA itself, although verified independently and covered in a blanket of silence, was done specifically to avoid any impression that the IRA had been defeated and humiliated.
After all, it was pointed out, this was all unprecedented stuff - no other armed group in Ireland's republican struggle had ever destroyed their weapons when warfare ended. The issue had to be handled with sensitivity.
That is all true but it is only part of the story.
The rest of the explanation lies in the fact that the secrecy allowed the IRA leadership to claim to its rank-and-file that decommissioning either hadn't happened or was of less significance than was being claimed.
It was the perfect example of constructive ambiguity in practice, of the grease being applied to the wheels of the peace process.
When the IRA first decommissioned some weapons in October 2001 for instance, supporters were told that the IICD had been given access to a compromised arms dump already under police surveillance.
The IRA had therefore given away nothing of value. On the second occasion the rank-and-file were told that de Chastelain had been fooled, that the IRA's engineering department had made up phony weapons and passed these off to the IICD. These were far-fetched and ludicrous claims, but to an audience unwilling to believe that the appalling vista they had been told didn't exist was now visibly stretching out in front of them, these tales were straws which they grasped eagerly. And in the process the IRA leadership slowly got its membership used to the idea that weapons could be decommissioned without the sky falling in.
In fact they were able to demonstrate that disarming actually brought gains and for that they were indebted to the unionist community whose already ingrained scepticism about the IRA's bona fides was enhanced and inflated by the secrecy surrounding the process.
All this took its toll on David Trimble's ability to captain the unionist ship through the choppy peace process waters.
His response - the only possible response his friends say - was to place obstacles in the way of Sinn Féin joining the power-sharing government until the IRA delivered and so the Belfast Agreement lurched from one crisis or suspension to another.
Eventually Trimble's ship was scuppered; Ian Paisley is the new skipper and the prospects that the Belfast Agreement will ever be revived must be dimmer.
Sinn Féin benefited from all this enormously.
Unionists were seen in Ireland and abroad increasingly as the problem, sympathy surged in the Republic and in the North Catholics turned increasingly to the younger,more aggressive Sinn Féin and away from the SDLP at election time.
The end result is a Sinn Féin party that dominates nationalism in the North and is building a stake in the South.
The secrecy surrounding decommissioning which Gen de Chastelain sanctioned may have been meant to make the ordeal of disarming easier for Sinn Féin and the IRA to bear but it had consequences which one doubts the general could ever have foreseen or intended.
No-one can seriously doubt that massive IRA decommissioning has taken place and that Gen de Chastelain and his witnesses were telling the truth yesterday, albeit a sadly incomplete truth, about what they saw.
Where the doubt exists now is over the worth of the exercise. The IRA's weapons proved to be immensely valuable chips in Sinn Féin's hands throughout the vexed years of negotiations and if they have now been finally surrendered it can only be because they have outlived their worth in the eyes of the Provo leadership and been replaced by other, more potent tokens such as the IRA itself, the persistent curse of criminality and the prospect of the Provos in the police force.
What Gen de Chastelain delivered yesterday was definitely not too little but it was almost certainly too late.
Ed Moloney is author of A Secret History of the IRA