Inside File: Peace process reeling into realm of stale Irish jokes

This, of course, placed the Irish who sought such a rib-tickling outlet on a dubious par with the material-challenged British comedians.
The Irish are not a stupid people. No race on earth is stupid as a whole, though each, and parts within each, clearly retain a sometimes frightening capacity for stupid behavior.
Take the IRA, for example. They dawdled and fiddled before they denied the Northern Bank heist, thus allowing every cop, politician and Monday-morning pundit to pin the caper on the IRA in its entirety, or some renegades bored with the endless peace process.
By the time P. O’Neill denied the robbery, it was far too late. The Provos stuck the finger in the dike after the field was, as they say in some parts, “drownded.”
The most intriguing aspect of the entire blame chorus directed at the Provos was the assertion, delivered over and over, that only a group with “Irish” as its first name would be smart enough, efficient enough and trained enough to pull off a robbery that, let’s face it, looked stunningly simple in both its planning and execution but resulted in such a haul that nearly all the remaining air was sucked out of the already choking peace process.
We’ve come a long way since, “Did you hear the one about the Irishman . . . ?”
Still, this must be a lousy time to be a loyalist. You get no respect at all from the coppers, who seem to think you’re too dumb to load money into a bag.
Ah well, there’s always the Chuck and Camilla frolic to look forward to. Time to break out the bunting and Queen Victoria china. Then again, perhaps not.
Meanwhile, all is confusion and everyone is rushing to their corners, including Bertie Ahern, who seems to be playing a classic game of good cop, bad cop with Justice Minister Michael McDowell, whether he’s intentionally in on the game or not.
This is a right mess, a crisis, indeed, perhaps, the precipice atop a political abyss.
And it will loom larger on U.S. soil in the coming days when Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Alex Maskey spearhead a multi-city Sinn F