Dealing with the IRA's terminators

There are more ways than one to challenge the authority of the state. You can, for instance, pull on a balaclava, saunter into a bar, or lean across a car, and shoot a suspected drugs dealer or two. By killing them, the IRA isn't simply acting as a somewhat extreme wing of Belfast Neighbourhood Watch: it is arrogating to itself the rights of trial, judgment and punishment. It is celebrating its own authority.

Because the IRA is not a liberal organisation, and most people are not natural liberals either, there will be some confusion about the morality of these killings.

Although Ulster Unionists and British ministers are treating the deaths as a threat to the Irish peace process, they don't instantly seem like a threat to anything at all except the drugs trade. It is rough justice, many will think. But most voters are, like the IRA, firmly in favour of the death penalty; and they loathe drugs dealers. These are unpleasant sentiments to admit after such murders, perhaps; but they are very widespread and need to be dealt with.

When Northern Irish eyes look south and see a drugs culture in Dublin which they fear and despise, they are being clear-sighted, not bigoted. For Dublin has a serious heroin problem, which has driven people there to desperation.

It was brilliantly summed up in ''Whacker Humphries'', a protest song by Christy Moore, in which the singer defended a flower seller who, though no angel himself, was so disgusted by the open selling of heroin that he helped to form a group called Concerned Parents Against Drugs. This organised street patrols and vigilantes to protect inner-city Dublin neighbourhoods. Or, as Moore sings, ''They called on dealers' houses and ordered them to quit/Time and time again they warned, we've had enough of it...''

Junkies weren't shot, but warned they would be ''moved out''. For a while, over a decade ago, the patrols had some success, though as Moore laments, Whacker Humphries eventually served a short prison sentence (for evicting an inner-city dealer with the splendidly Chicagoan name of Ma Baker). And now? Now the street patrols have gone and things are even worse.

The Dublin comparison matters for two reasons. First, it is a useful reminder of how desperate people feel about the dealing of hard drugs in areas where the state seems unable to stop it. If few take the law into their own hands, many more wish someone else would. How many inner- city Britons, told that a vigilante group had been formed to deal with local junkies, or that a notorious dealer had been summarily executed, would privately cheer?

Thus the IRA, arch-enemy of popular opinion, is, on the issue of drugs dealers, merely acting out the ''string 'em up'' instincts of its critics. On some questions, the IRA commander and the archetypal London cabbie are in deep, if illiberal, accord.

Indeed, these are widely-held instincts: everywhere, people lap up the vengeful morality tales that star Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood blasting anti-social elements to pieces. If all communities contained the kind of heavily armed and socially conservative gangs that Belfast boasts, who knows what would happen to the local retail outlets of the Colombian cartels? Politicians call loosely for a war against drugs; now they know what a real one would look like.

This, in essence, is why the southern capital has such a heroin crisis while Belfast doesn't - some 5,400 addicts, against just 23 registered heroin abusers in the northern city. It isn't because the people of Northern Ireland are abnormally moralistic and intolerant of drugs - Dublin's Catholics are just as traditionalist in these matters. The real answer is simply that Belfast's terrorists control their host communities far more effectively than the legally restricted police can do.

Having acknowledged that, we need to turn to the IRA's motivation, which is at least triple-layered. There is first (and least importantly) the puritanism of any revolutionary organisation.

These guys really don't approve of drugs, which dull the minds of Catholic youth and turn them away from a fervent concentration on British oppression. Just as heroin is the ultimate denial of the world of work, pensions, relationships and personal progress - the ultimate short-term consumer high - so it is also the ultimate rejection of politics and rebellion. These days, the opium of the people is opium.

Second, there is the need of the IRA to reassert its authority during a long ceasefire which may, or may not, lead to a peace agreement. It cannot survive unless it has the fear and respect of working-class Catholics. These are given because of its ability and willingness to act violently - if not against British troops, then against ''social parasites''. Just as primitive states worried that their authority would be undermined without regular and violent expressions of their powers, so the IRA acts now. Shootings and punishment beatings are the solemn Tyburn of the Republican revolutionaries.

Third, and connected to this, is the IRA's message to outsiders that it is still armed and ready - and is becoming impatient with the refusal of the other parties to allow Sinn Fein to participate in talks. There has been a lot of hysteria about the message. But it is probably regarded by the IRA as a comparatively mild one.

Had it really lurched out of political control, as John Taylor, the Ulster Unionists' deputy leader, alleges, then it would have broken the peace accord properly, and killed some politicians or RUC men. But in a grisly way, it reckons that the deaths of drugs dealers are a lesser thing, merely a sign of irritation, and will be taken by the authorities as such. And in a grisly way, it is quite right.

Yet this is a dangerous game for the IRA, as for its victims. It cannot for long use Catholic civilians as target practice. There is evidence that it is already running out of credible big-time villains. The latest man to die was not by anyone's reckoning an important player; there must come a point when even the least squeamish, least liberal local onlooker thinks the gunmen are going too far.

What comes next? The murder of teenage joyriders? The machine-gunning of tousle-headed shoplifters? The further extempore gun law is extended, the more people will eventually revolt against it and conclude that for all its faults and failures, legalistic and political solutions are better. This, after all, is the story of political progress across the world. It is why millions of natural illiberals have nevertheless eventually organised themselves into liberal polities.

John Major has a duty now, as before, to make it as easy as humanly possible for republicanism to find a political role in a liberal state. The Commons majority suggests that he ought to feel intimidated by the Unionist demand that he break links with Sinn Fein. But that would be the worst reaction. This long, slow and dangerous tiptoe towards a more decent Northern Ireland is the greatest thing he has half-achieved. Flinching now because of parliamentary arithmetic would betray not just himself, but the very democracy he is trying to promote. And even drugs dealers deserve a better memorial than that.