I think it's a good principle to refuse to negotiate slippery slopes, Pooka, and stick to what people actually say rather than surmise what you think they might say but haven't said. Wait till they say it.

If you are trying to anticipate people's actions, fair enough, you guess at what might lies behind their words - but if you are trying to counter their arguments, wait till they have said something that you actually want to challenge.

It appears to me that the IRA have genuinely turned away from the idea of attempting to gain their goals by "military" means. Nothing I have seen in the context of this latest affair appears to indicate that to be wrong - though of course the amount of actual information that is in the public arena at this point is relatively small.

But any "army", legal or not, is likely to have contingency plans for all kinds of things they have no intention of doing. I've never believed in the validity of the saying "If you want peace, prepare for war" - but that is the conventional view, and I would think it highly likely that the IRA might well accept it, in common with all the other armed organisations in Northern Ireland.