It's pizza delivery time at Massereene barracks, six mountains of mozzarella and ham coming up … But suddenly men with guns are shooting our boys, two dead, four others wounded. Before you can cut a slice of American hot, Northern Ireland is pitched back 10 years as politicians voice either anxiety or defiance, and the prime minister of the United Kingdom, no less, vows that "murderers cannot derail this peace process". Well, we shall see. But we should also ask where exactly "this process" is heading.
Irish republicanism, primed with passions and delusions, is also Irish history: it measures time in centuries, not decades. Its violence comes and goes over generations. Do the years of calm since the Omagh bombing signal something definitive, a final resolution? Or is the conflict not dead, merely sleeping? No political chorus, however vehement, can quite tell us that.
Some things, unstated, are also inevitable. It is inevitable that some grizzled zealots and some callow kids, self-styling themselves the "Real" or the "Continuity" IRA, will find co-existence and coalitions a bit of bore once the terror subsides exhausted. It is inevitable that time, too, brings forgetfulness, so nobody involved quite remembers that exhaustion, or the overwhelming majorities which rejected a bloody, futile struggle. It is inevitable that all the bomb-makers and snipers won't retire en masse.
They're still out there, the chief constable of the Northern Ireland Police Service Sir Hugh Orde has been saying for months. Not a lot of them, but enough to bring havoc; and he's obviously right. One spate of murders leads to another. The question now – a Massereene test of reality that can't be avoided – is how Northern Ireland responds.
The province, for those who do remember the 70s and 80s, is small and tightly knit. It has a porous border, just like Afghanistan, which can make life easy for killers on the move. But fundamentally this is a land where terror can only flourish for long if it's able to hide in a community too committed or frightened to turn it in. The Provisional IRA (just like today's Taliban, ringing Kabul) survived for more than two decades last time round because it had a community shield.
Is that true today of the splinter groups who blast and shoot on? Sir Hugh may have been issuing grim warnings, but he hasn't making quick arrests. Find a 250-pound bomb defused in South Down last month and sigh with relief, but worry over what comes next. This isn't just MI5 or RUC or army business. This is Northern Ireland business, and Sinn Fein business, people business. If there's no place to hide, no support, no community cover, then the Real and the Continuity cells will soon wither away. But the crucial word here is "if".
And so, inevitably, we're impaled on the second question, the one about a process without an end. It is, let's be clear, fantastic to see First Minister Robinson and First Deputy McGuinness working together. It is amazing that not just Ian Paisley but the DUP has come so far, and amazing that rows can be settled by months of negotiation that essentially leave Westminster (and its politically peripheral Secretary of State) on the shelf. But coalitions, in a world of toxic loans, crunches and cut-backs, aren't automatically fit for indefinite purpose.
Voters in a democracy will always want to know what comes next, to see what's the alternative. And, intellectually, Northern Ireland offers them no alternative but the gun. They must stick where they are, permutating Catholics and Protestants, loyalists or republicans of various intensity, in pact after pact – but they can't throw either set of rascals out. Togetherness is a permanent state, not an option. Any peace is conditional until what's mattered and divided Northern Irish society for decade after decade ceases to matter at all.
We're not there yet. We have many more decades to go. Relative prosperity, normality and the (fading) prospect of better times can help, but there has to be a clear answer, too, an open agreement about where the province is going. Do we remotely have that yet? When Gordon Brown – in the wake of Major and Blair – denounces the "evil" of Massereene, can he also define a long-term good? Or, 10 years on, is the process just a dark hole in which, malignities untended, the old monsters can still squirm and grow? Where "Real IRA" means just what it says?