Guest your comments are commendable but I despise your anonymity. At least put in a psuedonym so you can be distinguished from any other unidentified guest.

Yes, I would agree that Fiolar's first post may have seemed deplorable to anyone seriously trying to find solutions. But from other threads I have noticed that he is not a fool - so maybe he has tended to hear one point of view rather than others.

There is no excuse for the history of British excesses in Ireland or the protestant parliament that governed Northern Ireland 1921-72. But many PIRA hostilities were aimed at innocent civilian targets (in which, incidentally, many Catholics died as well as protestants), and long after most human-rights demands had been conceded. In 1972 alone, more than 1,000 bombs went off in Belfast - about three a day. I was there, and it takes some forgetting.

Fiolar says decommissioning is a red herring, and so it may be in many estimations. But is it unreasonable to see another point of view? Why does PIRA still need Semtex? This is a fair question, especially when it is remembered that PIRA broke its last ceasefire with a short warning that (while security had been relaxed)it had planted a bomb in London's docks area - a massive lorry bomb, in the event, which killed two innocent people and injured another 100. OK the bombing was needed, in IRA terms, to head off another split in its ranks. But who'se to say that this can't happen again, while all the materials are still available?

In any case, decommissioning would only be a gesture - no-one seriously believes any side would hand in everything, or that the IRA would thereafter be rendered helpless. (The only precedent I can think of for decommissioning was after the Rhodesian civil war, when Zanu PF and Zapu PF handed in a huge proportion of their total weaponry.) I know many who voted Sinn Fein last time round who think it is time the IRA handed in their explosives, and at least some of their guns.

On the other hand, as Fiolar would be quick to say, policing is still far short of the reforms necessary to win confidence in both communities. But I believe this will come. Bit by bit, in recent years, there has been progress that many of us would not have hoped for in lifetime.

One of the real practical difficulties is that many in the loyalist community were born into their unfair advantages (some petty, some significant) and find them hard to give up - a bit like asking wealthy Americans to sacrifice a little of their lifestyles to slow the global-warming trend. Nobody likes giving up what they've got, and sometimes force is not the best way to persuade them. Whether Northern Ireland is run from Dublin or Westminster, 900,000 belligerent prods could cause phenomenal hassle in a country of about 1.7 million. But inch by inch their position is being eroded, and that is significant for a community whose slogan is "not an inch."