Beware the Samson mentality. Not the Old Testament Chippendale’s dalliance with Delilah but his death in the temple of the Philistines. Like Samson, extreme Nationalists and Loyalists can often prefer destruction to creation and would heroically sacrifice themselves to pull down the pillars of the temple upon the heads of their enemies.

The Samson mentality always prefers Thanatos to Eros, rejection to reconciliation, the bitterenders’ self-destruction to any advantage for their mirror-image opponents and may have been most depressingly and accurately portrayed by Brian Moore in his novel, The Emperor Of Ice Cream.

Written in the early Sixties, that novel of Belfast during the Second World War has as its hero, Gavin Burke, a young Catholic who defies his solicitor father to join the other tribe in the Belfast auxiliary fire service. Like many Nationalists of his generation, the father rather fancies Hitler to take out the Brits and our hero finds little compensating solace working with a squad that includes only one other Catholic. But let not that and the novel’s other themes detain us. Only one concluding scene counts here.

On the one night that German bombers attacked Belfast, Burke is delayed by a quarrel with his girl-friend and arrives late at the depot to find all his colleagues are elsewhere, fire-fighting. He blunders around the blacked-out building in search of his equipment and uniform and climbs the stairs to the top-floor where he surprises his co-religionist.

What is he doing? Trying to play Samson. In defiance of the black-out, he is shining his torch into the night sky as if he could guide the bombs down on Belfast and all its people.

So this automatic man, this robot slave of history raises his torch, a light to bring darkness. Beware the Samson mentality. In the North, there will always be those who build no temples; instead they will bring them down upon the heads of their enemies. And on themselves.

I am 42; the Northern Troubles have been a poisonous stew for 25 years of my life. I hope to live another 42; I fear the Northern Troubles will last another 25.

I don’t want to make such a bleak assessment, especially since I accept pessimism can be self-perpetuating. I would love to be optimistic that the IRA could be weaned off the armed struggle but the foot-dragging and theological nit-picking (how many Armalites can sit on a comma?) of Sinn Féin after the Downing Street Declaration leads me to depression not hope.

Let both London and Dublin help through any clarification process with ingenious private assurances. Let both governments be flexible and imaginative about any amnesties for prisoners. It may not matter a damn.

I don’t believe that Sinn Féin, like any other professional negotiator in the end-game, are just trying to squeeze the last possible drops of advantage out of a settlement. I take them at their word that they are still talking about principles not tactics. But blind in their bunker, Sinn Féin just don’t seem to realise that their negotiating stance makes impossible demands not on the two governments but on reality itself.

No Christmas optimism was encouraged by the Sunday Business Post interview with Martin McGuinness. In essence, his position was obdurate: peace meant the fruits of victory, however disguised or deferred. Said McGuinness bluntly: “Anything short of a decision by the British government that they are leaving this country would be unacceptable.”

Thereafter Gerry Adams returned to play Republican mood music and talk in more opaque, less glaringly fundamentalist terms. Commentators, talking up the peace process, argued that the Adams-McGuinness double-act was a sophisticated negotiating gambit of the hard-cop, soft-cop variety. Martin McGuinness denied that and I strongly and sadly suspect he was correct. Rather he may have spoken frankly in the authentic tones of the hardliners who will determine the likelihood of any ceasefire.

Sinn Féin may have initiated an elaborate and seemingly eternal process of consultation but it won’t necessarily lead to a democratic result. Instead I gloomily submit that the history and structure of the IRA gives the Samsons an influence far beyond their numbers. For neither Sinn Féin nor the IRA will permit a split. Neither organisation can or will accept a peace that puts former brothers and sisters-in-arms at war with each other.

That’s the baleful lesson of history. The first Sinn Féin spilt led to the Civil War. Then the rift between the Officials and the Provisionals led to the bloody, bitter conflict between the two factions and the off-shoot, INLA. Both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness came to leadership in that era. Both they and their colleagues will not think peace worth a repetition of earlier inter-Republican feuds. The basic unity of Sinn Féin and the IRA takes precedence over peace.

Logic can only lead to pessimism. In effect, any decision to lay down arms needs not a bare mathematical but a preponderant majority of 70% or over. After all, what use is a ceasefire if the Provisionals of the Provisionals continue the war? In consequence, any militant majority has extra leverage. Some might even call it a veto.

But think what that means. A minority of Sinn Féin/IRA who themselves are a minority of the Northern minority community who themselves are also a minority of nationalists on this island continue to literally call the shots. No wonder there is confusion and bewilderment when Gerry Adams talks about “the self-determination of the Irish people.”

Should the Downing Street Declaration be rejected, an out-

come which seems more likely with each passing day, the condemnations will flood in. But it might be wiser to consider Sinn Féin/IRA as more fools than knaves, the dupes of a history that has still more tricks to play on a beleaguered, traumatised minority whose self-regard is bolstered by the belief that they are the true custodians of Irish nationalism.

These and other delusions grow ever more dangerous and not just for IRA victims or their volunteers who can, at least, claim to know the potential personal cost and the ultimate self-sacrifice in their commitment. For rejection of the Downing Street Declaration may lead not only to the isolation of Sinn Féin and the IRA but also to the potential marginalisation of those Northern communities that continue to support them.

But then, for Sinn Féin, the “Irish people” are a theoretical construct that is a source of enduring fantasy. Disregarding their derisory level of Southern support which effectively places them behind even the Greens, they continue to insist they know what’s best for us.

The most troubling emphasis in the Martin McGuinness interview was that he consistently focused on the power relationships between the Provisionals and the two governments rather than the politics of the people of this island. Assuming this bias wasn’t due to the questions of his interviewer, Frank Connolly, McGuinness thus presented himself as a military strategist not a democratic politician – a Derry equivalent to those Pentagon and Kremlin powerbrokers who negotiated through the Cold War in terms of military might, not democratic consent.

Hence the ludicrous notion that the British Government should somehow “persuade” the Unionists into an United Ireland. This isn’t just demeaning to Unionists in that it mistakenly perceives them as puppets of Westminster; it shows yet again how the Provisional negotiators make impossible demands on reality.

For “persuasion” is a sweet word to coat a more bitter and indigestible pill. Nobody believes that even the honeyed and emollient words of a supremely practised diplomat like Douglas Hurd could “persuade” Ian Paisley, James Molyneaux and those they represent into a United Ireland.

Unfortunately McGuinness wasn’t asked the question his position begs – what happens if the Unionists aren’t “persuadable”? For “persuasion” should one read “pressurisation” and eventually “coercion”? And what happens next should that fail?

For the moment, set aside the more extreme threats of the Loyalist paramilitaries. A far more profound political challenge could loom. What happens if the Unionists adopt tactics of mass non-violent civil disobedience? If there is a rerun of the strike that toppled the power-sharing executive? Or if the Unionist community en masse refused to pay taxes to Dublin?

A Dublin government’s writ just wouldn’t run. Who would police that society? Not the RUC, however reformed. Not the Gardai. And would the fathers and mothers of Kilkenny, Kinsale and Kimmage desire to see their sons conscripted into an Irish Army sent to pacify uncooperative Unionists?

And please don’t rely on that occasional Nationalist fantasy of UN involvement. The UN has neither a role nor a mandate to enforce any government’s rule against a peacefully protesting minority.

Ludicrously that leaves the British Army. Martin McGuinness may either not see or acknowledge it but the logical eventual terminus of his plea for British “persuasion” is an alliance with the British State whereby Sandhurst colonels and Cockney squaddies combine with the IRA in coercing the Unionists.

But such distortions become inevitable with a strategy based on military power not democratic politics. Furthermore the Provisionals’ strategy is flawed exactly because they simultaneously underestimate Unionist resistance and overestimate Southern willpower. It may even be that their search for British “persuasion” derives from an unconscious recognition that the equation doesn’t balance.

The IRA may bomb their way to a United Ireland but the South will not suffer for it. The Republicans may dream otherwise but just as Martin McGuinness is not Ian Paisley, this is an incontrovertible fact, tragically beyond the ken of the Provisional movement. They fail to realise that their strategy is actively opposed not just to the Southern state but also to all its people, in every class.

The South just will not risk a potentially traumatising transformation that tips it into any life-or-death confrontation with Unionism. Ever since 1968, its politicians have adopted a gradualist policy of quarantining the North which pecks and nibbles at Unionist supremacy, bolsters the SDLP and constitutional nationalism and seeks to ensure that the conflict is contained within the borders of the Six Counties.

The Downing Street Declaration marks no sea-change in Southern policy. And while Gerry Adams pleads for “clarification” from John Major, he would seem to fail to understand that the Declaration essentially marks the limits of Dublin’s own demands on London.

Or perhaps he does since Major and Reynolds (as James Molyneaux has astutely understood) have manoeuvred Adams into a position where he must put up or shut up and where his credibility as a man of peace has dissolved outside his own constituency.

Rejection will further isolate the Provisionals in their efforts to gain new international sponsors and support. The end of the Cold War diminishes the support of those who deem the Provisionals anti-imperialists while the new Irish emigrants to America don’t sign up for the sentimental republican pieties of the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Nor will their Irish electoral fortunes significantly improve, with or without the elimination of Section 31. They may temporarily gain a percentage point or two but repudiation of the Downing Street Declaration marks Sinn Féin as scapegoats outside the larger Irish nationalist community and Gerry Adams as the used-car salesman of the peace process.

Yet if Sinn Féin’s appeal is unlikely to expand, neither is it likely to decline in its heartlands. Can its supporters also be isolated and marginalised?

This could be the real tragedy of any “peace process”, a situation where those who most fervently desire a United Ireland become alienated from the rest of Irish Nationalists. Do either side in this divorce realise how close they are to separation?

At least, the removal of Section 31 may permit some dialogue now RTE can canvass opinion in Republican areas. Hopefully, Southern viewers and listeners can see and hear the public meetings, sponsored by Sinn Féin, and assess the prospects for peace.

The division of opinion may be well reflected by the opposing views of two of the former leaders of the Peoples’ Democracy Burntollet march, Bernadette McAliskey and Michael Farrell. In the Sunday Tribune before Christmas, McAliskey angrily and defiantly rejected the Downing Street document as a sham: “Damn your concessions,” she wrote unyieldingly. “I am a human being, entitled to dignity, freedom, justice and peace – in that order.”

On face value, some of her fears might seem warranted. She was chillingly suspicious, nay convinced, that any ceasefire would lead to an internal Northern solution that restored Stormont, Unionist supremacy and renewed discrimination against the minority.

Last week on Questions And Answers, Farrell addressed those fears and requested a gloss on the Downing Street Declaration whereby both governments and especially London guaranteed that Nationalists would be safeguarded against Unionist domination. Such a “clarification,” Farrell suggested, might just tip the balance of opinion towards peace.

Or does the balance still need to be tipped, for if we’re to believe the latest ITN poll, 8% of Sinn Féin supporters favour the Downing Street Declaration while only a mere 4% disapprove. At face value, this poll utterly contradicts the Sinn Féin leadership’s view that their support is, at best, confused and divided over the Declaration.

Of course, it might be prudent to take this poll with a pinch of sodium chloride. Some Sinn Féin supporters might take a negative view but prefer to muster politically correct, convenient and acceptable words to pollsters from outside their community. This has happened elsewhere in Europe and America where support for fascists and racists has often been underestimated by polls.

Even so to bridge the chasm between this poll and Sinn Féin’s own assessment of community opinion requires a staggering level of deception. Sinn Féin might believe itself sufficiently resilient to risk isolation but obviously a large section of their supporters don’t favour that gamble. The interests of Sinn Féin as an institution and as an ideology now run counter to the democratic aspirations of many of Sinn Féin’s supporters. Hitherto, it’s been universally accepted that Sinn Féin has an unyielding core vote of about 10%. But what happens now if some of those votes lean to the SDLP or elsewhere especially if John Major were to offer the sort of “clarification” Michael Farrell has suggested?

It should offer no problems to London. But will it be believed and accepted? The Samson mentality of instinctive distrust is a hard habit to break.

For the sake of both argument and goodwill, let’s make two concessions to Sinn Féin. First, that Gerry Adams is sincere in his desire to compromise for peace. And secondly, if more guardedly, that racketeering isn’t a factor in the motivations of the hardliners. It still may not matter; the peacemakers could be trapped by history and ideology.

For all Gerry Adams’ theological tongue-twisting, any peace that falls short of unity contradicts Sinn Féin’s reason for existence. This disadvantages Sinn Féin moderates in any debate. Hardliners have no need for hesitation or ambiguity when they appeal to the simple enduring catch-cries of Sinn Féin’s history. In contrast, Sinn Féin members who support a ceasefire find themselves speaking with forked tongues.

The Samson mentality may still dominate. The tragedy for those who support Sinn Féin is that the rest of Nationalist Ireland has moved on to worship at other shrines.