Following the latest statement from the IRA offering to meet with the arms decommissioning body, many commentators may well highlight the contrast between that message and the one emanating from a recent republican commemoration in South Armagh. It is a valid observation but one that is perhaps better understood when examined in tandem with two equally disparate signals coming lately from within the Sinn Fein party.

At about the time NI Dept. of Agriculture officials were confirming that Foot and Mouth disease had been found in the north of Ireland, Stormont Education Minister Martin Mc Guinness was unveiling what he described as; "a good news story". He was referring to his department’s plans for developing the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). This initiative is designed to attract private investment into the public sector. In return for injecting capital 'upfront', the private sector is allowed to charge an ongoing rent by way of reward for its outlay. It is a classically Thatcherite piece of economics and a measure that would normally not meet with approval from a political party claiming a left wing orientation such as Sinn Fein.

In contrast to the Education Minister’s welcome for free-market economics, Sinn Fein MLA John Kelly stated his profound opposition to the equally Thatcherite General Practitioner’s Fund holding scheme, in an article for the Belfast Telegraph a few days later. The disparity between the positions of the two Sinn Fein MLA’s highlights the obvious tensions between the party’s pragmatic desire to remain in office and the instinctive radicalism of many party members.

This ever-present dichotomy in the movement’s thinking and practice leads to one of its major difficulties. Many of those most attracted to the party’s new image are also likely to be of a more conventional left-wing mindset. They are uneasy at the prospect of privatised education and health, they baulk at coalition with right-wing parties in the South and they do not understand the need to remain silent about human rights issues in the USA in order to maintain a relationship with Washington. Rationalising the party line is obviously difficult under such circumstances.

There is of course one great escape route for Sinn Fein in this case and that is acting in deference to the whispered wishes of the IRA. Contrary to what some outsiders believe, the IRA does not exercise a heavy-handed or coercive influence over Sinn Fein. The relationship is closer to that which existed between the old TUC and the pre-Blair Labour Party. And in much the same way that Britain’s Labour Party leaders worked with trade union bosses in order to curb the influence of feisty young 'lefties', the IRA often plays the same role in negating the radical demands of Sinn Fein’s newer and younger activists.

The most recent manifestation of this was the Sinn Fein special ard-fheis of 1999 – called to ratify the GFA – when IRA support was crucial in winning breathing space for the party leadership’s efforts to sell the deal to the grass roots. In essence, the armed wing has become a firm advocate of pragmatism over principle and therefore a vital asset to the Sinn Fein leadership on its increasingly reformist path.

Convenient as this support may be for the party’s hierarchy, it involves a cost. Unionists in the North insist that there must be arms decommissioning if Sinn Fein is to remain in the Executive and there is a clear recognition in all quarters that if the Sinn Fein party hopes to enter a coalition in the South there has to be incontrovertible evidence of uncoupling from the IRA. Sinn Fein is therefore faced with a daunting dilemma. It must persuade the IRA to decommission quickly enough to satisfy the UUP and potential coalition partners in the South, yet not to do it so rapidly that the Provos suffer a total loss of face and credibility.

There is little doubt that, as with New Labour and the TUC in Britain, Sinn Fein will eventually extricate itself from its now unfashionable liaison with the IRA. This may well come about as happened under vaguely similar circumstances in the British Labour party, after the old guard helps tame the feisty radicals.

With all of this there is a real possibility – indeed, probability – that many unionists will view Sinn Fein’s distancing itself from the "physical force men" (and their materials) as a triumph for their own intransigence. These unionists will continue to display all the arrogance of old coupled with an ongoing refusal to make any meaningful compromise. And as has often been a fact too, a goodly portion of the case for ending the political union between Ireland and Britain will be made, albeit unwittingly, in orange halls and at the various unionist party conventions.