IN COMMON with most people in Ireland, the IRA wants peace. It is prepared to end its armed struggle against British imperialism within a matter of days so long as a suitable settlement is reached.
At the moment the British and their Official Unionist allies appear to be holding out for absolute surrender rather than peace. Nevertheless the Republicans are keen to be seen as making the running in the race for a settlement.
The present process in Ireland illuminates a number of political questions. Major's government has been revealed as a bunch of liars.
It is a fascinating quirk of parliamentary democracy that when Ian Paisley pointed this fact out he was suspended from parliament for telling the truth.
This fiasco will have been very instructive for millions of working class people who may be more sceptical about government statements from now on.
The 'peace process' also tells us a lot about the nature of Irish EUROPEAN NEWS end it has run in to. Its military campaign has clearly failed. The armed struggle poses no real threat to either the British Army or its state.
Moreover, as grotesque adventures like the Shankill bomb show, is not without the potential to be sectarian. In the 26 counties its attempt to make alliances with the 'nationalist base'of Fianna Fail and its ambivalence on abortion and divorce have reduced it to an bers of the 'nationalist family'.
They are desperate for political respectability, so desperate that they are on the brink of renouncing the anti-imperialist content of their own programme.
The examples they cite of political vision are no longer Connolly and Guevara but Arafat and Mandela, who have already negotiated their betrayals of the revolutionary masses.
Once again petty bourgeois nationalism has shown its limitations. In both the north and the south it has shown itself inadequate to the demands of the Irish revolution.