Two cheers for the Bush administration’s decision not to invite the leaders of Sinn Fein to the annual St. Patrick’s Day bash at the White House. Once it was authoritatively alleged that the Sinn Fein high command had foreknowledge of the IRA’s recent $40 million heist at the Northern Bank in Belfast, it would have been illogical for the leader of the free world to receive the political talking heads of a clandestine criminal conspiracy. The problem, though, is that while Irish Republicans have rightly been kept out, so, too, have all the leaders of Ulster’s constitutional parties – none of which is “inextricably linked” to an armed paramilitary wing that engages in mob activities and literally crucifies teenagers who get in their way.

In other words, the administration has responded to wrongdoing by Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army in the fashion of a high-school principal who faces persistent misbehavior from a group of thuggish teenage gang-members. Instead of suspending the malefactors alone, he punishes the entire class. This is because the administration, prodded by elements in the British and Irish governments, is not yet prepared to impose any sanction that smacks of “exclusion” of Sinn Fein and the IRA, lest this give “the movement” an excuse to return to full-scale terrorism.

Indeed, reliable reports now suggest that “hard-liners” on the IRA’s ruling army council had wanted to bomb London because they deemed the pace of concessions to their organization not to be fast enough, but the “pragmatists” persuaded them to compromise by settling for the recent robbery. The government’s reasoning is wanting. The democratic development of the whole of the island of Ireland – north and south – cannot be held hostage to the internal management problems of Gerry Adams. As Ed Moloney has observed, the IRA has no option of a serious return to “armed struggle” in the post-September 11 world, and even its 1996-97 campaign was a fiasco. Given that America is the leader of the global war against terrorism, the right move for the administration would be to permit no more fund-raising and no more visas for Sinn Fein on these shores.