GER COLLERAN A gender-stereotyping male minister would be in hot water by now.

JUST over two weeks before the historic IRA ceasefire of September 1994, a 20-year-old Catholic, Seán Monaghan, was murdered by loyalist psychopaths in Belfast. Seán, who lived with his Protestant girlfriend and twin daughters, first escaped his killers, who had tricked him into thinking they were from the IRA. He was tricked again when he thought he was getting a taxi home but was handed back. He was found shot, bound and gagged, his body dumped on wasteland.

The unspeakable depravity of the violence that occurred in the North during those decades of sectarian murder and mayhem was underscored at the trial of the men responsible for Seán Monaghan’s slaying.

The killer turned to the Monaghan family and said: ‘I shot your son, four in the back of the head. I’m proud of it.’

Such outrageous displays of naked hatred and psychopathic callousness are now, thankfully, rare following the Good Friday Agreement as the paramilitarists on both sides put away their guns.

The Peace Process can claim credit for stopping the daily slaughter – but, in truth, the North is still not a society at peace with itself.

Tribal tensions are simmering away underneath a veneer of normality and the politicians have still failed to put a power-sharing government together, more than two years after the collapse of the Stormont Executive.

For a generation of young people entirely unfamiliar with the brutal reality of violence and sectarianism in the North the appalling murder of Lyra McKee in Derry, on Holy Thursday, should give them a visceral sense of what a ‘return to violence’ would mean for their generation.

So too should the revolting menace of about 150 so-called republicans parading in paramilitary dress down O’Connell Street in Dublin at the weekend. It was a reminder of the latent pathology in Irish society, a self-maiming, self-hating virus that conflates patriotism with violence.

And, because it’s a virus, it’s difficult to know what treatment to use. Since independence we have tolerated physical force republicanism

as something that will always be with us. So we’ve attempted to come to terms with it, deciding for the most part to tolerate the mostly dormant virus for the sake of peace.

Every so often, however, the virus inflames – with the most terrible consequences.

Despite that, we’ve failed to enact laws that would have prevented the kind of deliberate intimidation and threat seen in Dublin on Saturday. The laws we do have are weakkneed and, in the criminal justice sense, useless.

Section 15 of the Offences Against the State Act – a piece of legislation that overall has been central to the battle against terrorism in Ireland – outlaws military and training exercises.

The law, however, is unclear as to whether it is a crime to parade without guns in the manner of last weekend’s affront to democracy.

This needs to change. It’s also an offence, without permission, to wear Defence Forces uniforms, or any imitations.

This law, too, is clearly ridiculous as it seems to be perfectly okay to wear uniforms that look like, for example, those worn by the Croatian special forces.

The events that took place on the main street of our capital city on Saturday, and in other cities and towns throughout this State, represent a direct challenge to democracy.

It’s a thumbing of the nose by those who’d deprive us all of our rights – even the right to life itself.

And we need to respond. We simply cannot allow a band of reckless armchair generals and their led-by-the-nose ‘volunteers’ bent on destruction to strut their contempt for the rule of law, and for there to be no consequences.

Paramilitary displays of the kind we’ve just endured must be confronted. That means crystal clear laws with appropriate and proportional penalties. We face the same stark choice we’ve always faced, either we believe in protecting the freedoms we enjoy, or we don’t. We can tolerate the virus’s episodic inflammation or we can tackle its root cause.

The harrowing agony suffered by Seán Monaghan’s family in Belfast, with his murder in 1994, was repeated time after time during that awful blood-letting now euphemistically referred to as the ‘conflict’.

The North descended into an unspeakable hell during which violence simply got out of hand.

Are we now, after all we know, going to tolerate a tiny remnant of blood-thirsty fanatics stoking the embers of sectarian hatred in the hope of a return to violence on a grand scale?

Surely not?

It’s a thumbing of the nose by those who’d deprive us of our rights ...even of the right to life itself