David McKittrick: Will this crisis turn into a catastrophe?

The political world has yet to figure out whether the latest extreme turbulence in the Irish peace process is catastrophic or just another of the crises which it has periodically encountered and overcome.

It will certainly be a major setback when the Government mothballs the Stormont power-sharing executive next week. A suspension will inevitably last for months. The message will yet again go out that the two traditions, given every encouragement to reach an accommodation, have found it impossible to work together.

But the optimistic reading is that although much will go with suspension, much remains. The Stormont executive was the centrepiece of the Good Friday Agreement, but by no means its only component. The Agreement also contains hugely significant constitutional clauses, guaranteeing Northern Ireland's place in the UK so long as a majority wants it, and provisions on human rights, equality and policing. It also sets out an important role for the Irish Republic. London and Dublin will do all they can to preserve this superstructure even though one part of it has been dislodged.

Thus the overall Agreement will survive even though power-sharing has temporarily gone. A few Westminster MPs will be drafted in to keep ministerial seats warm until devolution can be restored.

Beyond all this is the most fundamental question of all, which is what the crisis will do to the peace process. The process is about more than the Agreement: it is about whether Northern Ireland is to move towards peace or regress towards war.

Here the portents are, perhaps surprisingly, rather good. Almost all informed opinion has it that the IRA and indeed almost all of the other big battalions have no intention of going back to fully-fledged campaigns of violence. That does not mean that Belfast is enjoying tranquillity: it is not. Loyalist paramilitaries roam the streets at night looking for each other in deadly internal feuding which has already claimed two lives. The Real IRA is set on bombing itself to a united Ireland, mounting occasional attacks in a campaign which even other republicans regard as pointless.

The mainstream IRA is, obviously, still there. It does not blow up London or shoot policemen in Belfast or lay booby traps for soldiers in south Armagh. But it does send people to consort with narco-terrorists in Colombia, and administers "punishment" shootings and beatings. And it has been involved in intelligence-gathering in government offices, collecting and presumably privately chortling over the minutes of meetings between Tony Blair and David Trimble and the like.

Some republicans and nationalists quietly admire such activities, regarding them as part of a long tradition, going back to Michael Collins. After all, they argue, don't the British maintain a huge spying apparatus of their own?

The collection of the addresses of prison officers, however, is difficult to square with this concept of legitimate political espionage, and there is real embarrassment among republican supporters about the whole thing. The power-sharing executive might have been doomed anyway, and it looked as though Unionists were set to take the lion's share of the blame. But at a stroke, the Stormont revelations have wrongfooted republicans, and momentarily left them with nowhere to sit in the game of political musical chairs.

Yet for all this republican badness, the assessment of security people, and almost everyone else, is that the IRA is almost certainly not going back to full-scale war. The assumption is that the coming political negotiations will not be conducted against a background of a deteriorating security situation.

In those negotiations Unionists will be demanding some exceptional concession from the IRA. The more moderate Unionists will be genuinely hoping that this will help put the executive back together again; anti-Agreement Unionists, however, will hope the IRA will not deliver, so that no new executive is formed.

The IRA and Sinn Fein are highly enthusiastic about the power-sharing executive, since Martin McGuinness has shone as a minister and since the system has helped maintain the rapid rise in the republican vote. That vote is going up so steeply they might well become the dominant party after new Assembly elections.

Republicans will be under great pressure in the talks, but pressure rarely perturbs their capacity for cool calculation. How far the IRA might go will depend to a large extent on its analysis of what is happening within Unionism.

Mr Trimble has shared power with Sinn Fein, but the balance of power within his Ulster Unionists has shifted, apparently decisively, and the anti-Agreement lobby is now in the ascendancy. At the same time the party as a whole is fast losing ground to the Democratic Unionist Party led by Ian Paisley, who is triumphantly claiming vindication for his characterisation of republicans as incorrigible. This means a clear majority of Unionist politicians do not want a return of Sinn Fein to government under any foreseeable circumstances. In this they reflect general Protestant opinion.

The question is whether Unionist disenchantment can somehow be dramatically reversed. If it can't, there will be no new power-sharing government, and crisis could turn to catastrophe.