The date is Easter Sunday 2016. On the steps of Dublin's General Post Office a grey-haired, silver-bearded man steps forward to a microphone and intones: "in the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland..."
It is 100 years to the day since the father of Irish republicanism, Padraig Pearse, spoke those words, on that spot, at the start of the 1916 Easter rising.
At the end of the recital a brief flicker of a smile crosses the lips of the newly re-elected Irish Taoiseach. The republican wheel has, after a century of bloodshed and negotiation, turned; Ireland is united and Gerry Adams is leader of a 32-county Irish Republic.
Will it happen? Peter Mandelson thinks it may. He is wrong. It will. To understand why, you have to focus on the underlying reality of the 1998 Good Friday agreement and the state of politics in the Irish Republic.
In 1990 Michael Oatley, head of MI6's counter-terrorism division for western Europe, approached Martin McGuinness to re-open an old channel of communication with the IRA. Oatley, a dedicated decoloniser whose career has followed the shrinking contours of the British empire, wanted to sound out McGuinness on peace moves. The initial talks were cautious but it was the true beginning of the Irish peace process. The latest Irish war had run its course. There was more to be gained by peace. The Oatley-McGuinness discussion was only the start of a whole series of secret talks that continue to the present including last summer's face-to-face meetings between Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, and the IRA army council in Belfast on decommissioning.
The unwritten understanding is that the IRA will cease its terror campaign in return for continued British commitment to the negotiation of political change in Northern Ireland's status. It doesn't sound much, but it is.
Gerry Adams was the main mover behind the change. In the early 1970s he became head of the IRA's Belfast brigade and oversaw a determined terrorist campaign in the city, including the 1972 Bloody Friday bombings. By controlling the IRA's most important unit Adams became a significant IRA figure and as a 23-year-old was involved in the clandestine 1972 talks between the IRA army council and Ted Heath's government.
Adams was later arrested and imprisoned for three years. In prison he rethought republican strategy and rejected the sacred abstentionist republican theology that had sustained the IRA through 50 years in the political wilderness after their defeat in the 1922 Irish civil war. Republicans had to get elected in Belfast and Dublin, and reshape Ireland's political structures from within. Adams realised that republicans had to make it possible for the Brits to leave and for anti-violence Catholics to vote for them.
In essence, Adams replaced the old republican doctrine of endless, futile armed rebellion against the "British occupiers" with a plan to dissolve partition by an all-Ireland alliance. He realised that as long as republicans were a minority within the Catholic minority in a Protestant-dominated state then the IRA was going nowhere. The unionist veto could never be conquered. Adams's strategy also benefitted from John Hume's eagerness to embrace a broad nationalist alliance-to the SDLP's eventual cost.
Twenty years on, phase one of that plan has culminated in decommissioning. The "peace process" is a kind of shorthand for all the political forces of Ireland, the SDLP, the Irish government, Fine Gael, the Irish Labour party aligned with Sinn Fein against the unionists. Instead of being a tiny minority within the unionist state, the republicans are now part of the majority informal political coalition in the whole of Ireland (plus most of Irish America). Republicans are brim full of confidence, unionists, conversely, are introverted and nervous (a serious worry to British ministers).
Of course, partition and its political structures still stand. The unionists are still the majority in Northern Ireland (just) and the status of Ulster cannot be changed without their political consent. The republicans remain within the boundaries of a British state.
Phase two starts now with the successful establishment of the power-sharing Stormont assembly and the all-Ireland institutions. In order to sell the whole package to the unionists, both the Brits and the republicans had formally to accept that none of the institutions of the Good Friday agreement could lead directly to a united Ireland. But the republican aim is not to enshrine the Good Friday agreement in administrative stone but to use it to move on to the next stage where Sinn Fein becomes the dominant political force on both sides of the border.
The best way to destroy Stormont is to subvert it from within by gaining control of the levers of power. Hence, Martin McGuinness now combines his leadership role in the IRA with his control of Northern Ireland education. With British connivance, the republicans believe that legitimacy will start to shift to a myriad of all-Ireland bodies that will undermine the monolith of unionism. After time, unionism will split into a pragmatic accommodating majority and a small rejectionist rump.
Already, Sinn Fein has eclipsed the SDLP north of the border with four Westminster MPs. Sinn Fein runs a first-class press machine. Its spokesmen, particularly Adams, are world-recognised figures. In contrast, the SDLP leadership are ageing and unglamorous. Once John Hume retires, the "natural leadership" of nationalists in Ulster will pass to Adams; Sinn Fein will have gobbled up the SDLP.
But the real battleground for Sinn Fein in the coming years is the Republic-with the first target the next Irish election due within 15 months. The circumstances could scarcely be more favourable for the "Shinners" big push in the south. For the last five years every southern Irish political party has been reeling from an endless spate of corruption scandals. Even Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has admitted signing a book of blank cheques for his predecessor Charles Haughey. The only clean party on the block is Sinn Fein.
Economically, the Celtic tiger is faltering with the US downturn, providing a launch pad for Sinn Fein's left-sounding agenda. But its biggest political draw will be nationalism.
For all the new wealth and self-confidence, and the new relationship with Britain, you cannot take nationalism out of Irish politics. The recent decision by Ahern to dig up Kevin Barry, an 18-year-old IRA gunman executed in 1918 by the British, and give him a state funeral was a transparent attempt to renew Fianna Fail's green credentials and fight off a Sinn Fein challenge.
Most observers expect Sinn Fein to gain at least four seats in the next Dail contest, including the election of Martin Ferris, a convicted IRA gun-runner, in North Kerry. In the tight Irish electoral world of proportional representation Sinn Fein could even end up in a coalition with Fianna Fail. The party will at last have a bridgehead to begin the long attack on the south from within the folds of government. Ahern has vowed that no such coalition can take place until the IRA "folds up its tent." But he may eat his words if the alternative is opposition.
Irish history teaches that those who fight in the national struggle and then hang up their guns, like De Valera, inherit political power. It is this ambiguity about violence and the use of force in the national struggle that is Sinn Fein's greatest asset. In a state that still reveres Pearse's Easter days of violence his provisional descendants like Adams are one day also bound to inherit the mantle of his legitimacy.
