Adams must condemn this outrage

BILL Clinton gave it to them straight in Mackie's factory in West Belfast. To the Republican terrorist slogan "Our day will come", the President told them: "Your day is over."

Yet even at that moment, in some shed or garage, they were building the bomb that blasted Docklands.

While their political leaders told the world they had turned their backs on violence, the terrorists show they have not.

Twenty-five years of painful lessons that terrorism will never win, and still too many have not learnt or will not learn, so immersed in their own propaganda they cannot see what is happening.

I assume, I think rightly, that the majority of the terrorists want peace. But there are those for whom violence is a way of life, regardless of the views of the majority of their countrymen.

So what about the peace process? Has the work of the last 17 months been lost?

Steadily, relentlessly, the process has been moving forward. Security restrictions have been vastly reduced, and life in Northern Ireland has greatly improved.

During the past 17 months Sinn Fein has come in from the cold. Its leaders now talk direct to British, Irish and US governments. We have moved forward, even though no progress has been made over arms decommissioning. And this is the crucial issue.

Sinn Fein/IRA refuse to budge on this. What's more, they seem incapable of understanding why it matters.

It was to get past this that the Mitchell Commission was set up. But Senator Mitchell got a blunt refusal from Sinn Fein and the IRA. Mr Major's suggestion of elections as a way to talks was designed to get round that obstacle.

The resulting assembly was never supposed to be another Stormont, but a vehicle to take the parties to the table. Before Friday that way was open, but there must now be fears the IRA has dealt those hopes a fatal blow. Does the bomb mean an end of the peace process? Now, more than ever, we need to know where Mr Adams stands. He has never condemned an IRA outrage.

Nor, despite the Government's concessions, has he offered any of his own.

If he can't condemn such an outrage as Friday's now, how can he maintain his claim to be "wedded to peace"?

Outside the secret web that is Sinn Fein/IRA, nobody knows if this is a mad, uncontrollable splinter group or a carefully-laid plan to return to the IRA's own awful version of the twin-track process, bomb in one hand, ballot paper in the other. Only Mr Adams can answer those questions. Unless he can do so clearly, the task of maintaining any confidence with the democratic parties will be nigh impossible.

But I passionately believe we can keep the peace process alive. We cannot let bombers destroy the work for peace and the hopes of millions.

There can be no concessions to violence. But equally no over- reaction. That's easy to say. And I understand Unionists whose patience with Mr Adams is at an end.

It is up to Mr Adams to give assurances that there is any point in continuing. Only then, shaken and fragile, can the peace process remain.

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