"A single act of censorship by a newspaper against its columnist may not seem a very heinous crime, even when what that columnist wrote turns out to be true. But the Irish Times is in a way representative of most of the Irish and British media. The paper will not — or, at any rate, did not — publish a word that might threaten the notion that the peace process is a rip-roaring success. It does not matter that Sinn Fein-IRA was guilty of spying on its opponents at Stormont at a time when Sinn Fein was part of the devolved administration.

Or that the IRA refuses to submit to public decommissioning of its weapons. (So humiliating for the poor dears.) Or that last month three men linked to the IRA were jailed in their absence in Colombia for training terrorists. When one of its own columnists suggests that the IRA was responsible for a violent bank robbery, this is too much for the paper to bear. Yet it was — and will doubtless do many more bad things.