Orange Card too far
When the former leader of the UUP, James Molyneaux, claimed that the IRA cessation of 1994 was the `most destabilising' event in the history of the northern state, he betrayed the real attitude of unionism towards the peace process.
The IRA's cessation exposed them to a process that would begin to unearth the political realities of 30 years of war. State violence, human rights violations, sectarian discrimination and collusion between the British forces and loyalist death squads - the dynamics that held the Six-county state together, the dynamics that would tear it apart.
Unionists could no longer restrict their politics to condemnation of and hate for republicans. Toppled from their self-built moral high chairs, they would have to find a new issue with which to obscure political reality.
d sure enough a new excuse, `decommissioning', was found and used to delay the pace of progress again and again.
In the intervening period, the issue of IRA arms has been used, increasingly, to inhibit every positive move in the peace process.
Unionism has used it as a precondition to developments on institutional change, policing, demilitarisation and the equality elements of this process, which should be regarded as human rights but are obscurely portrayed as concessions to republicans. The reality is that unionism see any moves towards equality as concessions to republicans.
This is why, when the IRA made its unprecedented move this week, David Trimble immediately rejected the ensuing statement from the IICD and found a new stick with which to beat the peace process.
After the IRA proposal was announced - and accepted as genuine by the IICD - David Trimble said that it would not be enough. He now insisted that unless the SDLP accepted the UUP and British government's stance on policing, the process would not move forward.
Most republicans would have seen this as yet another desperate and futile attempt to again stall the peace process, and believed it would be viewed as such by the British government.
Two days later, however, by suspending the institutions for more `talks', the British government snubbed an IRA initiative it had heartily welcomed just days before and made it impossible for the IRA to maintain its position.
Ultimately, what the British government has achieved this week is to tell republicans that, when things come down to the wire, it will still play the Orange card.
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