It is a tribute to the gall of Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army that their leadership remains convinced of their inalienable right to be received at the White House on every St. Patrick’s Day – no matter what atrocities they commit. But it would be especially grotesque if Gerry Adams and his camarilla were to gain access to President Bush this particular March 17. Such a mark of esteem would come just months after an IRA unit perpetrated the largest bank robbery in Irish history, removing some $50 million from the vaults of the Northern Bank in Belfast. In consequence, the Ulster peace process has been cast into gloom, and the reconstitution of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive has been indefinitely postponed.

So why did the Irish criminals do it? Until now, they had gotten away with denying involvement in such illegal activities. But their denials have not worked this time round. Apart from the ludicrously credulous William Flynn, chairman of Mutual of America, nearly everyone has blamed Sinn Fein/IRA for the robbery. Prime Minister Blair, Taoiseach Ahern, and the chief constable of the massively reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland have all made the connection.

The Bush administration is understandably enraged. Mr. Bush threw valuable political capital into shoring up the Leeds Castle talks between the mainly Protestant Unionists and the mainly Catholic nationalists in November 2004. The Unionists want to keep Northern Ireland as part of Great Britain, while the nationalists of Sinn Fein and the IRA want Northern Ireland to leave Great Britain and join the rest of Ireland. But while the Sinn Fein leader, Mr. Adams, was talking peace to the president, the organization with which he is inextricably linked and on whose board of management he sits was planning this massive heist. It is intolerable that the commander in chief of the world’s only superpower should be humiliated in this way by a group of two-bit provincial hoods masquerading as freedom fighters.

Elements of the Dublin government, notably in the highly nationalistic Department of Foreign Affairs, are already seeking a “favor” of the Bush administration to keep their beloved peace process going at almost any price. But there is an independent American interest in all this irrespective of the wishes of the Irish and British states. Sinn Fein/IRA is one of the most anti-American political movements in Western Europe: its newspaper, for example, has described Colin Powell as a war criminal. Its foreign cognates are such terrorist groupings as the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hezbollah, the Colombian FARC and the Basque separatists of ETA. If it ever joins a coalition government in the Irish Republic, it will make the southern state more hostile to our interests: think of the difficulty which even the current Irish government had in securing landing rights at Shannon for American military aircraft during the liberation of Iraq.

The beginning of a second term is a fine time for Mr. Bush to reassert the moral indivisibility of the global anti-terrorism struggle over the siren calls of narrowest sort of ethnic politics. A good first step would be for Ambassador Mitchell Reiss, the Bush administration’s point man on Northern Ireland, to recommend that the ban on Sinn Fein fund-raising in America be re-imposed and the visas of Mr. Adams and his key confederate, Martin McGuinness, be revoked. St Patrick’s Day is a celebration of the Irish contribution to civilization. The Sinn Fein/IRA leadership represents the antithesis of that proud heritage. We do not need them here.