Fans of the wonderful HBO television series The Sopranos will all have their different favourite moments. Maybe that epic knifing in Satriali's Pork Store? Ralphie's grisly demise in the bath-tub? Or Tony's whipping of a corrupt local politician with the belt from his pants?

My favourite moment comes when one of the secondary characters, Christopher, as he is lying in his hospital bed recovering from a serious shooting.

In his delirium he recalls his near-death experience and tells Tony Soprano that he has actually seen Hell, and it's policed by its very own bouncer. Hell, as Christopher explains, is an Irish pub on the New Jersey coastline called the Emerald Piper where it's St Patrick's Day forever.

Gerry Adams's vapid article in last Wednesday's Guardian should be pinned on the door of this horrific establishment, because, for him, and his cohorts, the rallying cry is the same, "A United Ireland very soon", and this is a record they're going to play forever.

He writes sweetly about the tough questions that he's willing to ask on this journey towards the 32-county Utopia, which must begin not in Northern Ireland (perish that thought), but in London.

We are assured that "to achieve all of this requires those of us who share these goals to find ways in which we can work together.

"Is it possible to put in place a formal structured broad front approach to campaign for a united Ireland?

"Or would it be better to opt for an informal, organic and popular movement based on core principles?".

It isn't so much the repetition of these inanities that is so profoundly depressing, so much as the deep intellectual and emotional vacuity that lies at the heart of the non-analysis here.

His sentences are suffused with the latest buzzwords about ethnic empowerment, community organisation and outreach programmes, though we are happily spared any mention of "ecologism" (!) or "the Irish Freedom Charter", those vital components in his under-butler Eoin O Broin's prescription for unity, as outlined in his over-priced and under-argued pamphlet, Sinn Fein and the Politics of Left Republicanism.

Even Toireasa Ferris can't stomach this nonsense, having recognised that the Northern mafia around Adams is leading the party into intellectual and political oblivion with the kind of cod sociology that Eamon Smullen was ridiculing almost 40 years ago.

Time is at a stand-still in the Emerald Piper and Adams remains wedded to hardcore republican theology and the same tattered parade of arguments.

Ulster Protestants still remain mere chattel in this analysis, pawns on a chess board to be moved and manipulated according to the whim of more powerful actors.

The article once again emphasises "British policy" as the "key to unlocking the potential for this change to occur", and his references to Britain's "colonial past" are simply a coded way of denying the democratic basis of the unionist desire to go their own way in 1920, however imprecise the constitutional line-drawing was at that point.

So, having waded through the conciliatory references to dialogues with 'ethnic minorities' and Professor Brendan O'Leary's ecstatic theories of future Irish federalisation, we are left as ever with an argument that would have cheered Slab Murphy and Brian Keenan: Get the Brits to force the Prods into line; talk for a bit with them, then start pushing.

His name checking of O'Leary here makes a lot of sense, since he is a worthy companion in the Emerald Piper.

He wrote a bizarre essay in 2005 called Mission Accomplished? Looking back at the IRA, where he cleaned up every one of PIRA's historical arguments for modern consumption, and tinkered with PIRA's kill-rate statistics in a manner that few other experts accepted, leading many of us to wonder if this had been written by the ghost of Liam Lynch in high dudgeon.

Here, O'Leary said PIRA punishment beatings were simply "by-products of the absence of legitimate state institutions" (ie the Brits made them do it).

He also wrote that the "IRA demonstrates the power of the weak", an argument that is never squared with the fact that they killed more innocent Catholics than all of the security forces combined at full gallop. And his claim that "the IRA famously does not do drugs'' must have come as a severe shock to its new friends in FARC.

For all the constitutional pyrotechnics here about future confederations and pooling of sovereignty, there are the usual malevolent mutterings about "demographic transformations" which must strike self-respecting unionists as a Tim Pat Coogan-style threat. If the "political process" doesn't get you, then the breeding sexed-up Catholic minority will, so you better start making a deal.

And O'Leary's conclusion that "the IRA may in good faith amend its constitution to accomplish its own dissolution in a manner that the majority of the ghosts of the first Dail would approve" showed just how warped the premises of his arguments actually were.

So, even when Adams makes an appeal to academic opinion, the best he can do is to an academic who writes papers which channel the ideas of a mouldering generation of revolutionaries and political fantasists.

Has the Irish historical argument ever seemed so palpably threadbare?

It is clear from Adams's non-analysis that even after all these years -- even after Enniskillen and those "human bombs" -- modern Sinn Fein still has no answer to the question posed by Taoiseach Jack Lynch in the white heat of 1970.

Rounding on the fundamentalists and the sectarians, Lynch asked them whether they wanted to "adopt the role of occupying conquerer over the one million or so six-county citizens who at present support partition?

Would we compel them to flee the country altogether, or live under our domination, in constant opposition, feverishly nursing hatred and secretly plotting revenge?".

Adams may have some monologue prepared in answer to this profound question, but we can't hear him.

The music in the Emerald Piper is too loud, and even his own colleagues like Toireasa Ferris are heading for the door.

John-Paul McCarthy teaches Irish history at Exeter College, Oxford