TWO QUESTIONS come to the fore in the wake of the two car bombs that blasted the Army's headquarters in Ulster - and, arguably, blew away the tattered and fragile Northern Ireland peace process.

The first is: Was the security vigilance at the base dropped?

For there is a sense that, despite the end of the IRA ceasefire in February, the authorities in Northern Ireland, noting that the resumed bombing campaign had been confined to the mainland, had refrained from restoring an old-style clampdown on movement in order not to incite the terrorists into the use of the bomb in the province once more.

If so, they have been dreadfully disabused.

There must be a thorough investigation to determine whether this bomb outrage was assisted by lapses in security.

But it is the second question that chills.

Is this the end of the peace process?

For if it is, as many fear, then Ulster - and Britain - stand to be plunged back into the hell that prevailed for a quarter of a century before. Lives will be wasted by bomb and bullet to no avail and with no end in sight.

Whether that awful prospect is to become terrible reality depends on whether the loyalist paramilitary groups react by scrapping their ceasefire and on whether the bombing of the barracks at Lisburn was the work of a maverick hard-line republican splinter group or of the IRA.

If it is the latter, signalling to the loyalist community that the conflict in Ulster is now fully resumed, then back into the darkness the province is plunged.

For John Major it will be a sorry development to see blown away the tenuous peace that he and those who also worked for it had briefly achieved.

But how or by whom might that goal be restored?

It is a pity that the fragile peace process cannot have been grasped in the way that the festering mess in Bosnia was by the Dayton talks - so that the warring sides were made forcibly to realise that only by concessions, not conflict, would they achieve peace - or in the same way that the Oslo agreements steered the still-volatile Israeli-Palestinian situation towards concessions and away from lasting conflict.

Is there no hope of that realism in Northern Ireland?

Or is it, as it often wearily seems, that too many people there, on both sides of the sectarian divide, prefer to keep their hatreds alive?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.