| Any day now the cartoonists will start drawing the Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, his sidekick Martin McGuinness, and their gruesome accomplices in the Provisional IRA as The Adams Family - all fangs, claws, pointed ears and butcher's knives.
In the space of a few weeks, the public reputation of Adams has sunk from "the Nelson Mandela of Ireland" to that of the mouthpiece of the local "Murder Incorporated".
Even Senator Edward "Teddy" Kennedy crosses the road when Adams approaches, and Republican Peter King remembers a previous engagement that will force him to cancel his speech at the next Sinn Fein fundraiser.
O! What a fall was there!
Yet what had Northern Ireland's "Murder Incorporated" done that it has not done before to cause such a nervous distancing from reliable old friends?
Murder? What's another killing when you already have more than 2,000 deaths under your belt? Intimidation of witnesses? Par for the course. Lying? Hey, they always claimed to be politicians as well as terrorists.
What has made the difference, apparently, is that the Sinn Fein-IRA machine suddenly looks as if it may be losing the support of its "base" - the Catholic working class areas of Belfast.
The IRA has controlled these areas by threats, killings and "punishment beatings" since the Good Friday Agreement brought peace of a kind to the city. And all because of a pub brawl.
In the Sinn Fein-IRA stronghold of Short Strand, a man got into a quarrel with some IRA "volunteers". He was then savagely beaten on the instructions of their local chieftain.
And when his friend Robert McCartney - himself a Catholic and Sinn Fein sympathiser - went to his assistance, his eye was gouged out, his throat was cut and he was cut with a knife from sternum to throat, "gutted like a fish" in the words of Kevin Myers.
McCartney died and his friend survived only because he was rushed to a life-support system in hospital. After the crime, the IRA men removed the tape from the pub's security system and warned the 70 witnesses present to say nothing of the incident.
Nothing unusual so far - nothing to compare with the recent crucifixion of a local youth who had offended someone in "the Rafia". Almost 50 other people have been murdered in similar circumstances and their frightened families have quietly buried them.
Unmarked grave
Remember the case of Elizabeth MacConville? This widow and mother of 10 children gave a cup of water to a dying British soldier in 1972. For this Christian act, she was abducted by the IRA, murdered and buried in an unmarked grave in southern Ireland.
Thirty years later, the IRA, as part of the peace process, identified her whereabouts. But when her children held a funeral service, the word went out that locals were not to attend. Her coffin was carried through empty streets to an almost empty church.
McCartney, however, had five brave women - four sisters and girlfriend - who were determined that he should receive better justice than that. They campaigned publicly for a trial of his murderers.
For some inexplicable reason their campaign ignited public anger and indignation where previously fear had prevailed.
Graffiti attacking its IRA "protectors" appeared in Short Strand. Crowds attended McCartney's funeral.
And as the crime became internationally known, invitations to Adams and Sinn Fein for the White House celebration of St Patrick's Day were retracted -and the brave McCartney women were invited in their stead.
Not only were they brave; they were also highly principled. When Sinn Fein-IRA, seeking to extricate itself from this almost unprecedented experience of bad publicity, offered to murder his IRA murderers, the women were tempted, but refused. What they wanted was justice rather than revenge.
Will they get it? Is Sinn Fein about to discover that it must finally choose between democratic politics and criminal murder? And will the IRA finally be forced to disband to make the Belfast peace a genuine one?
Unfortunately, it is not easy to be optimistic on any of these counts. Even though Sinn Fein-IRA has publicly called for witnesses to McCartney's murder to give evidence to police, their private instruction to locals has been very different.
Not a single witness has come forward - to the police, that is, since the IRA has apparently interviewed several. Meanwhile, the "Rafiosi" believed by locals to be guilty of the crime still swagger through the area's clubs and pubs.
Doubtless, too, Adams and his consiglieri calculate that they can survive this rebellion of ordinary Catholics as they survived earlier ones. Before the McCartney women, there were the "peace women" in 1976.
Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan led large demonstrations of both Catholics and Protestants to protest against terrorist violence when three children were killed by the car of a fleeing IRA gunman. They were awarded the Nobel Prize.
But they believed that peace was above politics; the two women parted company - Williams going to Florida and Corrigan becoming an international peace activist. Their movement faltered and declined.
It is now a decent but modest fringe organisation - testimony to the truth that peace must rest on something more substantial than a temporary mood of public anger at a bestial crime.
Full and permanent peace will only arrive when governments mobilise public opinion in support of a firm declaration to terrorists of all stripes.
Clear message
The message should be stern and clear: disband or face exclusion from the political process and (in due course) prison.
The Bush administration knows this. Its Northern Ireland envoy, Mitchell Reiss, said recently: "It's hard to understand how a European country in the year 2005 can have a private army associated with a political party."
And it is believed that the White House was prepared to invite Ireland's democratic parties to last Thursday's festivities (as well as excluding Sinn Fein) if the London and Dublin governments agreed.
Only Britain's Tony Blair and Ireland's Bertie Ahern seem nervous of such a firm response. That is a turnabout for the Brits in particular. London used to want Washington's cooperation in cracking down on Irish terrorism.
Now it apparently wants US cooperation in not cracking down on terrorism.
Blair and Ahern demonstrate the melancholy outcome of the appeasement that the peace process has become.
In the end the appeaser becomes so committed to the process of appeasement that he cannot hold the aggressor to account for his aggression. So, naturally, his aggression continues.
Unless Blair and Ahern learn courage from the McCartney women and firmness from Bush, the Adams Family will continue to frighten, maim and murder for another decade or two.
John O'Sullivan, former adviser to Lady Thatcher and former opinion editor of the New York Post, is a member of Benador Associates. | 
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