Latest figures show that the Italian Mafia is making over €90m a day through protection rackets, bribes and illegal moneylending, putting them in the same bracket, economically speaking, as Fiat.

At the same time, we are expected to believe that the Provisional IRA has given up on crime altogether and decided it doesn't want a share of the generous spoils currently being raked in by their Italian cousins.

The UK's Ulster Secretary says so. The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, now says so too. Indeed, the PD deputy is "100 per cent" certain that this is the case. And who are we to argue with such distinguished statesmen?

Even so, it surely behoves us to ask one simple question. Say they're right, and that the IRA really has abandoned crime. Why?

The penalties for being engaged in crime were never very severe, after all. Indeed, at first glance it's hard to remember any penalties at all. The only possible reason they can have, therefore, for giving up a life of crime is that they're doing it out of the pure goodness of their little Northern hearts. Bless.

Either human nature has changed immutably on the island of Ireland in the last couple of years, in which case we really need to get to the bottom of it, or else there's something seriously wrong with the latest announcement of the IRA's saintliness. Whilst everyone else in the world thought rigorous enforcement of the law was the way to tackle crime, our approach was to make life easier for the criminal - but we're being told, with a straight face, that it worked. Worked so well, what's more, that crime simply vanished.

Republicans are ecstatic. The Sinn Fein cheerleaders of Daily Ireland quickly went to press to report that the IRA had officially been declared to be "not involved in so-called criminality" (and there's a whole thesis on bad politics to be written around the use of the phrase "so-called" there; what an Orwellian nightmare of language manipulation it conjures up). They even used the announcement by the two governments of the IRA's collective innocence to argue that there never was a problem around IRA criminality tobegin with.

Perhaps because, if the IRA is involved in "so-called criminality", then it ceases to be criminal simply as a result of those acts having been committed by the IRA? Or are we supposed to regard bank robberies and cross-border smuggling as nothing but a spot of lighthearted Whisky Galore-style divilment?

Two equally noxious dynamics lie behind last week's announcement. The first is the pendulum theory of pressure which the British and Irish governments apply to the North. In recent weeks, it was Ian Paisley's DUP which was being mollycoddled with reassurances by the Taoiseach that nothing was going to happen in the near future that would frighten the Orange horses. This discombobulated IRA/SF. Hence they had to be mollycoddled in turn, and the Prods discombobulated. The alternative strategy of simply deciding what is right and doing it has never permeated thinking in Dublin and London. They just go from one extreme to the other and have the effrontery to call it subtle diplomacy.

The second dynamic at work is the ongoing attempt to detach the activities of individual members of the IRA from the IRA itself. And because it is practically impossible to prove that individual operations were ever sanctioned directly by the Army Council, it is always feasible to cast each crime committed as a private rather than a collective act. That is why Northern Secretary Peter Hain was so eager to stress that there may be "localised individual criminality by former and maybe existing members of Provisional IRA" but that this was not "organised from the centre criminality".

The problem with this approach is that it flies in the face of recent history. Republicans are proud of the united way in which they faced change. From ending "military" operations to decommissioning to disbandment, they stayed together. Splits were minimised. Iron discipline was maintained. But suddenly we are being asked to accept that, after staying united in the face of such fundamental ideological issues as the right of republicans to bear arms, this remarkable discipline has evaporated in months over nothing more than money.

What we are witnessing is another manifestation of the First Law of the Peace Process: what the IRA wants, the IRA eventually gets. There was yet another example of it last week, and one potentially even more disturbing than the clean bill of health given to the Provo racketeering machine by the two governments, and that was the green light given to republicans and loyalists to run Community Restorative Justice schemes, allowing them in effect to bypass the police and subject local communities to paramilitary law instead.

After years of being told that SF approval of the police was the one missing piece of the jigsaw that would make everything else fall magically into place, they now turn round and say: "Aw, don't bother, just make up your own laws and enforce them however you like."

There are precedents for similar schemes in other countries, but in none has the process been so totally detached from the mainstream policing and justice system as the ones currently being bolted into place in vulnerable communities in the North. The meagre safeguards being put in place will have no more effect than a balsa-wood fence in stopping a runaway truck.

Yet the one party to sound a warning over the establishment of this sinister "state-funded quasi police" by former terrorists isthe SDLP (whilst remaining understandably silent about how their own supine meekness allowed IRA/Sinn Fein to become so dominant).

The irony is that the people backing these schemes are the first to complain when the North is treated differently to the rest of the island. Jim Gibney, former Sinn Fein ard chomhairle member, now writes for the Irish News. Last week he praised SF for "challenging" the "Free State" to extend and "include" the six counties, before concluding: "Those in the political establishment in Dublin and Belfast comfortable with partition and the status quo are already opposing the emergence of this 'one nation' politic".

One nation, is it? How can republicans say they wish to be "included" in a state whose lawmaking and law enforcement mechanisms they entirely reject, and to which they are openly seeking to establish provocative (or should that be provo-active?) alternatives?

According to Gibney: "Time and effort will be required to overcome the partitionist mentality". It is republicans who need to overcome it most urgently. And they could make a start by accepting the same laws of the land with which the rest of us happily comply.

In the absence of that, they have no answer to the charge that they are attempting to create a shadow state on the island, which exists alongside the official one, leeching off it parasitically when it wantsto, and ignoring its moral and social parameters when they prove inconvenient - and all with theultimate aim of supplanting it in due course.

Michael McDowell explicitly levelled that charge only last year. Now that he has seemingly changed his mind, it becomes all the more urgent that our beloved leaders share with us, and indeed the rest of mankind, the extraordinary elixir they have apparently found which transforms the base metal of criminality and subversion into the gold of democracy and harmony. Don't be shy, gentlemen, we're all dying to know.

- Eilis O'Hanlon