It's hard for Gerry Adams to find a way out of the impasse There's a fairly simple reason for the current protracted nature of tne present crisis in the peace process. It really is the last throw of the dice.
If the negotiations come to a successful conclusion then the republican arms will be "put beyond use", and British arms will remain against a background of nightly sectarian assaults by loyalist death squads tied to the British. It will be pretty hard to disguise the reality of defeat.
That is the main element of the protracted negotiations. The republicans are making one final attempt to wring concessions that they can claim as This shouldn't lead to any real crisis. The republicans have already lost all the major battles and risk losing the approval of their capitalist partners in the nationalist family if they hold out too long. In any case they are scrabbling amongst the scraps of the agreement.
They are looking for concessions on policing when the British already have two police bills under their belt - both of COX EYES A column from Socialist Democracy, Irish section L of the Fourth international which ensure their ancollite control of the force and ensure that the RUC will be able to torture and kill with impunity if it is required to do so.
The republicans are looking for the removal of some military posts in South Armagh at a time when it is clear that they British will maintain a massive military and intelligence pres ence there for the foreseeable future.
The utter silence of the unionist camp gives the game away. The internal unionist timetable should have led to a council meeting in January and the ousting of Trimble because of the concessions given to republicanism. That scenario is so laughable that even the Unionist right appear unable to proceed witn a stralent lace.
Massive unionist discontent remains - simply because many bigots can't stomach any role for republicans and nationalists - even subordinate roles in a British victory. This is presently expressed through an undeclared sectarian war that sees nightly bomb attacks on Catholic workers.
The republican leaders privately dream of an entity that they always argued could never exist - a reformed northern statelet. Yet even before a final settlement is declared, events prove the unreality of the reformist illusIon.
It's not unionist bigotry we should focus on, but British action. That action has made major shifts to the right in the structure of an agreement that was already an undemocratic and sectarian settlement.
Actions of the ground today are even more ominous. Most sectarlan attacks go unreported. The press report a split in the so-called Ulster Democratic Party when the reality is the vast majority of the paramilitary UDA is breakng from the agreement "he "new" RUC invent republican splinter group they claim is carrying out sectarian attacks, to cover up loyalist feuding at a time when the British claim that a peace deal has been brokered.
Beneath the smiling face of the Good Friday agreement the skull of the old sectarian state is showing through. The result is growing discontent within the republican base and a growing opposition.
Unfortunately the vast majority of the opposition is coming from republican militarists who have learnt nothing and understood nothing following the republican deteat. Political understanding, a political resistance, will be slower to arrive.