By Kevin Toolis, author of Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA's Soul

SO AT LAST the IRA has a face. The most tenacious terrorist movement in Western Europe appointed a former IRA prisoner as its public spokesman to deliver what many hope will be the IRA's final statement: that the Provos will disband. And that the 800-year Long War — the longest-running conflict in human history — is finally over.

Yesterday was a historic day. At 4pm all IRA units were formally ordered to dump arms and cease to bomb, murder or rob. From now on the IRA, according to the statement, will cease to act. The gunmen will retire and wait for a united Ireland to appear somehow. The Long War will become the Long Wait.

For anyone who has had any dealings with the sharp end of the IRA's war the significance of the statement cannot be understated. Almost 22 years ago I began my reporting career beside a green Mercedes with a shattered driver's window. On the tan leather upholstery was the blood of William Doyle, a Catholic judge who had just been murdered outside his church. On the back seat were the Sunday morning papers, bought on the way to Mass in the expectation of a quiet Sunday afternoon.

As a Catholic, Doyle was an easy target. The IRA had been waiting for him at St Brigid's Church in a smart part of Belfast, probably hiding among the congregation; perhaps even members of that congregation.

The IRA had hoped to kill Doyle just before Mass finished. But something had gone wrong and by the time the hooded gunmen were in position some hundred people were mingling outside the church. But murdering folk in public never deterred the IRA. A gunman wearing a duffle coat walked up to his car and fired through the window, shooting Doyle five times in the head. Onlookers began to scream, but the gunmen ran down the road to a waiting getaway car and disappeared. They have never been caught. The judge's brother, Denis, a doctor, vainly tried to resuscitate him, but it was over; he was dead. The priest who had just celebrated Mass administered the sacrament of the Last Rites on the road.

It was just one killing on the Troubles' long murderous road. A snapshot of what the IRA's war was really like. An end to such killings, such awesome human callousness, can only be an unequivocal moral good.

But the IRA's statement was careful to state, and restate, that the "armed struggle was entirely legitimate". It did not recognise that the Troubles were a terrible futile waste of life. There was no sense of repentance or acknowledgment that Irish history took a turn for the worse in 1969 when old men with guns and a poisonous ideology formed the Provisionals. To placate its followers today the new IRA leadership was careful to put up, as its public face, Sean Walsh, an old comrade of Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker. Sands is a kind of republican saint, so no one close to him could be guilty of betrayal. But that past connection also raises the question — what did Sands, along with the other 3,500 victims of the Troubles, die for? What was achievable by the gun that was not possible by the ballot box? These are questions that the IRA presumably has no wish to answer, even though it now accepts that the gun no longer has a place in Irish politics.

The statement is historic, but it is also part of the elaborate choreography that accompanies every "breakthrough" in Ireland. What we are seeing is just the public face of fiendishly complex negotiations taking place off-stage. As part of that process, Sean Kelly, the Shankill bomber, was whisked to freedom in defiance of the Government’s legal procedures. Nothing comes free in human conflict and there is a price, and a deal, for everything.

There is also the price that unionism will demand from Gerry Adams if it is ever to agree to share power. For seven years Sinn Fein has signed up to the Good Friday Agreement and yet the IRA has continued to kill, beat and rob. It will take a bit more than a videoed statement to convince Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, that the IRA is genuinely ready to take part in democratic politics.

More immediately, there is the vexed issue of IRA decommissioning and how this can be verified without being photographed. In reality decommissioning is a purely symbolic act — the IRA could always replace the weapons it destroyed with new ones tomorrow — but the number, nature and proximity of the verifiers to the IRA’s arms dumps will be closely contested with General John de Chastelain, who heads the decommissioning body.

Perhaps the most significant absence in the statement was any reference to disbandment. Does that mean that the IRA will cease to exist in its strongholds, will stop its punishment beatings and will the kind of "clean-up" activities carried out after the murder of Robert McCartney no longer happen? The jury will remain out on whether that sort of behaviour has ceased for a long time to come.

The IRA will go on somehow. To understand why you have to be familiar with its mythology. It sees itself as the repository of 800 years of struggle. It has fought for Irish freedom since the hated English Planters arrived around 1180 led by Strongbow, the warlord from Wales.

In their own minds, IRA supporters are the army of the dispossessed. Though vanquished by their English overlords they have never surrendered, and are only waiting for the next call to arms to overthrow the English. Yesterday’s statement will not have changed that ancient republican mindset.

The IRA's army may retreat more deeply into the shadows, but it will still be there waiting for the Planters of the Crown finally to admit defeat and sail home to England.

(Source: Times Online)