New Statesman: Completing unfinished business? The Irish peace talks have been rocked by the killing

There is a revealing passage in the diaries of Sean Duignan, government press secretary to the former Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds. In the two months leading up to its cease fire of 31 August 1994, the IRA shot dead three prominent members of the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA). For Duignan this seemed at odds with official optimism about republican intentions. However, he received a knowing assurance: "'Unfinished business,' I was told."

The murder of Billy Wright inside the Maze Prison by members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) would also appear to fall into that category of "unfinished business", a final reckoning with someone who refused to be put out of the business of paramilitarism. The only problem with a category like "unfinished business", of course, is its elasticity: what for one side is celebrated as a single act of justified retribution is for the other an act of intolerable provocation. The murder of a former republican prisoner and the wounding of three others in a retaliatory act by Wright's Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) repeated a familiar pattern. The security fear, intimated in the responses of the British and Irish governments, is that settling old scores might break the current ceasefires to which neither the LVF nor the INLA are party.

That fear appears ill-founded. The murder of Wright will probably be limited in its impact for a number of reasons, two of which are worthy of mention. There has, of course, been real concern about prisoners' issues in loyalist politics. The Popular Unionist Party, which speaks on behalf of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), some of the former members of which now constitute the LVF, has threatened not to return to the talks on 12 January. The Ulster Democratic Party, close to the UDA, has also expressed discontent with prison policy. This has nothing to do with conditions inside the prisons (the issue on which the unionist parties believe the Secretary of State should resign). It has to do with perceived inequities over the release of loyalist and republican prisoners. In other words, discontent within loyalism pre-dates Wright's murder and is unconnected to it. The likelihood is that the Northern Ireland Office is prepared to finesse sufficient "confidence-building" measures with regard to prisoners to satisfy both loyalist parties. The irony is that the INLA, an opponent of the peace process on the republican side, has removed the one person capable of subverting fidelity to that process on the loyalist side (a person threatened with death by the UVF for that very reason in 1996).

Second, because both the LVF and the INLA are small and geographically confined - the LVF concentrated mainly in mid-Ulster and the INLA in North and West Belfast - the security forces should be capable of keeping their known members under constant surveillance, thereby limiting the scope for further violent action. There seems little possibility of the IRA or the UVF and the UDA becoming involved in a general resumption of hostilities. Moreover, there is no evidence that this is part of an IRA plot to seek an "exit strategy" from the talks, as David Trimble has suggested (though it may have revealed a possible exit mechanism for the IRA). Nor is it fair for John Hume to accuse some Ulster unionists of using the latest killings as an excuse to derail the talks. If they had wanted to do that then the decommissioning of IRA weapons was a more appropriate issue.

The risk to the precarious stability in Northern Ireland for the government lies not in the Wright incident but more deeply in the peace process itself. The faith that success is possible rests on certain rationality assumptions about the players involved. A simple distillation would be this. The talks are about parties in Northern Ireland reckoning the impossibility of winning outright (especially by violence) but yet realising obtainable democratic objectives. This view involves three interlocking assumptions: first, that a rational distinction can be made between symbol and substance; second, that politicians are capable of recognising the distinction between symbol and substance; and third, that a deal can be made on the basis of politicians realising the value of substantial advantages even if they have to swallow a certain amount of distasteful symbolism.

In short: unionists/loyalists will have to swallow the symbolism of cross-borderism in order to secure the substance of Northern Ireland's place within the United Kingdom; and nationalists/republicans will have to swallow the symbolism of Northern Ireland's Britishness in order to secure the substance of parity of esteem. Northern Ireland politics, of course, has been traditionally based on different rationality assumptions. Symbol is not distinguishable from substance. Symbol is substance; and those symbols - marches and anthems or flags and emblems - are worth fighting for. It has been, in sum, the politics of communal assertion. In the reasoning of those who subscribe to the government's view, these traditional positions assume a necrophiliac quality, embracing what is deadly and self-destructive. The Wright murder has actually provided an opportunity for Mo Mowlam to hammer this point home once more.

The real test will come in the next few months when the detail of what is thought to be a "reasonable" solution requires agreement. The minimum nationalist demand - cross-border bodies with executive powers deriving their mandate and original functions from London and Dublin - is something that unionist and loyalist negotiators are unlikely to concede. For this is not seen as merely a symbolic gesture to satisfy nationalist aspirations but a substantial concession to the goal of Irish unity. Such cross-border arrangements appear to most unionists to privilege the principle of Irish unity over the principle of consent. Equally, it seems unlikely that republicans and nationalists could accept a settlement that not only secured the Union on the basis of consent but also returned to unionists a measure of control over policy in Northern Ireland by way of a local assembly. That would privilege the principle of consent over the principle of Irish unity.

The government appears to calculate that even if a settlement is not reached by May, neither the IRA nor the major loyalist paramilitaries want to go back to full-scale campaigns. That business, it hopes, is finally finished - and it might take some comfort from the muted reaction to Wright's death. Yet it would be a brave person indeed who would propose that the stake is finally through the heart of Northern Ireland's violent tradition.

The writer is senior lecturer in politics at the University of Ulster at Jordanstow