The immediate back story to the killing of two Royal Engineers at Massereene Barracks in Antrim - now claimed by the Real (as opposed to the Provisional) IRA - is what makes the story politically and it is personally tragic for those directly involved.

This organisation is the same one responsible for the deaths in the Omagh bombing of 1998. That it has taken them nearly eleven years to reform and take action is due to a number of factors. Public revulsion - the victims numbered nine children, a woman pregnant with twins amongst them - probably being a significant, if not the decisive factor.

There has also been a determined security force effort to maximize the infiltration of the organization with informers and high level spies which has thwarted any further actions. Massereene is a message that one part of the organization is free enough to hit directly at the British presence in Northern Ireland without MI5 having the least knowledge of when or where..

That makes Massereene an acid test of just how robust the new dispensation is. So far the answer has to be ‘not very’. 

One of the consequences of the St Andrews’ Agreement is that the anti terrorist Special Branch function was removed from the control of the PSNI and from the oversight of both the current Policing Board and any future local ministry from Policing and Justice.

This allowed Sinn Fein to argue that there would be no active British or anti insurgent presence in Northern Ireland. The PSNI would be a civil police force directed by an locally elected (ie an ‘indigenous’) minister.

The construction of a huge MI5 building in Palace Barracks just outside Belfast, was an inconvenient truth easily ignored. Until last week that is.

The proverbial brown stuff hit the fan last Thursday when the BBC reported the deployment of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment to support the PSNI (now shorn of its operational anti terrorism capables) in tracking a terrorist threat that MI5 believed was becoming critical.

Ironically neither Brown’s visit, nor the postponed trips by the First and Deputy First Ministers or the many gestures of support or condemnation from party leaders will substantially affect the political outcome of the Northern Irish Peace Process. Too much has been lost and too much gained to go back to the killing.

As Anthony McIntrye notes, the dissidents have too long a road to travel to realise anything like success:

It will not kick start any campaign on the scale of the failed Provisional IRA armed venture. And if that failed in circumstances that were arguably more propitious for success than those of today, then there is no chance of current armed republican actions succeeding.

If anything it will help expedite yet another weary acceptance amongst Sinn Fein activists and the supporters that the revolution is over; and the realisation that they must embrace what they have de facto become: political defenders of the British state monopoly of force in Ireland.