I HAVE always been slighly dubious about Tony Blair. He has shown, since his election to office, the same alarming swivel-eyed tendency developed by Margaret Thatcher in her later years as Prime Minister.

Such people with that gleam in their eye display nothing but an absolute conviction that all their ideas, madcap as they may be, are absolutely right for all of us.

There will be no consideration whatsoever of any alternative course of action because this decision is the correct one and the person making the decision is infallible.

In a visit to the grief stricken town of Omagh - where 28 people were killed and hundreds injured in a terrorist outrage to match any other in Ireland's bloody history - Blair announced a Government policy which will inevitably harm the peace process by a much greater degree than the bombers could ever have hoped to.

New legislation which is before a recalled Parliament today (Thursday) is designed to directly attack terrorist splinter groups who have not yet felt it appropriate to abandon their guns and step into the debating chamber.

If the law is passed it will be possible for anyone to be convicted of being a member of a banned organisation on the word of a senior police officer of the rank of Superintendent or above.

Membership of a banned organisation carries a maximum of ten-year jail penalty.

Despite the anger and outrage felt over the killing and maiming of innocent people by the so-called Real IRA, the introduction of repressive legislation such as this does nothing to help the peace process.

In the immediate wake of the Omagh bombing the RUC issued statements to the effect that misleading warnings were given by the terrorists in order that as many shoppers as possible would be herded into the area where the bomb was actually situated.

This showed a remarkable ability on behalf of the RUC to abandon its grip on reality at the drop of a hat.

For one thing, the Omagh bomb was intended to be a continuation of the tactics already used by the Real IRA in many other towns in the province, whereby few people had been injured but a large amount of damage had been caused.

What went wrong on this occasion we have not found out, but the warning was confused with tragic consequences.

The terrorists had nothing to gain by mass murder. In fact the opposite is true, they had everything to lose.

The splinter republican group, the Real IRA has lost any dubious support they had with members of the Irish community on both sides of the border, and, which should not be underestimated, among sympathisers in the USA where the collecting slogan, ' Give a dollar to kill the Brits' has traditionally been used as a highly successful incentive for our good American friends to provide funds used to buy explosives and guns.

Even the leaders of Sinn Fein for the first time decided it was appropriate to condemn the murders.

The Omagh bomb will probably mean the beginning of the end of the Real IRA. It has also prompted another republican splinter group, the INLA, to declare its own ceasefire on the grounds that there is an obvious lack of popular support for the continuation of the so-called 'armed struggle.'

If the terrorists had specifically intended to murder as many people as possible they would not have given a warning at all and could, in the aftermath of the explosion, have simply denied any responsibility for it.

This does not take away one iota of guilt from the bombers, whose stated intention was not to murder innocent men, women and children, yet were quite prepared to risk it in order to further their opposition to the Good Friday agreement.

Anyone who cynically considers families shopping on a Saturday afternoon as unintended casualties of war has descended to a moral stratum inhabited exclusively by psychopaths.

But hysterical statements issued by the RUC in the aftermath of the Omagh outrage and a knee-jerk reaction by the Government by bringing in repressive legislation we are more used to observing in the courts of a tin-pot dictatorship, do not convince me that officials are taking the correct view.

Sadly, a long-term peace in Ireland will probably be constructed from the gravestones of those who died so meaninglessly, not from Tony Blair's patched-up draconian legislation.

It is a law ripe for misuse and such misuse will serve to do nothing but erode the few atoms of trust which exist between the Government and mainstream republicanism.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.