There is hard news and soft news, according to the sainted John Humphrys. (He likes the hard stuff; his BBC employers have gone soft at Six). But you can split categories of news every which way - including, as Mo Mowlam might add, real news; the news where reality bites. Consider: I'm sitting a few weeks ago with a very senior copper discussing the aftermath of the Jill Dando murder. Where did the hit man buy his gun? Surely Jack Straw's dynamic ban on gun ownership has made the whole firearms scene much tighter?  Not really, says top cop reflectively. He can rattle out a long list of pubs where anyone with a wad of fivers can pick up a pistol in 30 minutes flat. Laws don't get in the way of trade. The Straw package may make life tougher for deranged amateurs: fewer guns in legal circulation mean fewer fumbling fingers on triggers. But don't, for a second, suppose that the professionally determined are much incommoded. There's a sharp bang a couple of streets away as I leave. A dodgy exhaust - or a touring Yardie?  In other words, if you want a gun and know where to look for it, the underworld is your oyster. Parliament can pass laws till kingdom come - but, for the drug runners, bank robbers and terrorists, life and death continue as though nothing had happened. And if that's true in the east end of London or Manchester Moss Side, it must be even truer in Belfast (where the Straw law, remember, doesn't run anyway).  Did anyone seriously suppose that the Good Friday agreement would lead to complete disarmament along the back alleys and side roads of Northern Ireland? Did David Trimble suppose that the IRA would turn in every last armalite and stash of grenades? Did Gerry Adams suppose that the UVF and the rest wouldn't forget to turn in the hardware under the floorboards?  Of course not. They 're talking symbolism, not reality. See how, across Europe, the Kosovo Liberation Army claims to have met its own disarmament obligations. Nobody believes that - and the murder of Serbs continues unabated. Kosovo, in any case, is a vast dump of weaponry left behind: enough to keep the black markets of the west stocked for years.  Even if the IRA, in some unimaginable circumstance, turned in every last gun tomorrow, it could be up and shooting again in three months. The reality of peace isn't turning revolvers into ploughshares: it is, slowly, painfully, ensuring that fingers slide away from the triggers.  But unreality, alas, is so much easier to play with; the mouthings of unreality glide so much less painfully from political lips. And one unreality feeds on another. Thus the unreality of a symbolic start to disarmament (which wasn't in the agreement to begin with) leads, over stretching time, to a deliberative pause in which our secretary of state is required to deem the ceasefire firm or illusory. Mo Mowlam does what she was always going to do, what she had no option but to do. She deems the process battered but fundamentally intact.  The IRA have not taken up guns again against the army or the police or the leaders of unionism. There has been no return to sectarian killing. The gangs and the protection racketeers are still operating with some brutality. But no Good Friday words on paper ever could or ever will do much about that - just as no words of Straw, transmuted by parliamentary draftsmen, could stop Dando's murderer going to a pub he'd heard about from the friend of a friend. The essential, basic peace remains.  Again: everybody intimately involved knows this. David Trimble, first minister designate of Northern Ireland, knows it. Even the suddenly omnipresent Jeffrey Donaldson, Ulster Unionist MP, knows it. The roars of outrage and threats of legal action, the prating calls for Mo Mowlam's head, are ritualistic and synthetic. They are either a way for weak men of moderate goodwill to hang on to power in the hope that better times will come - or a thinly disguised attempt to wreck the agreement and shelve every vestige of what process remains by men who never wanted peace on these terms in the first place.  The real news is that divide and that debate: not the flummery of fury. And the real issue behind it needs to be put still more starkly - in a way that even John Humphrys might quail over.  Back to my truth-telling top cop. Can we (I once asked him, in the darker days before Good Friday) ever defeat the IRA? Can our army ever bring peace at the point of a gun? Is there a military answer of enforcement and internment and massive policing which is the alternative to accommodation and compromise?  Straight questions: straight answer. No, there isn't an alternative. Good intelligence can abate the violence for a while, but it can't stop it.  There is no law and order solution here (any more than a large army billeted in Kosovo can prevent ethnic cleansings or simple gangsterism). The alternative to the way things are is a return to the way things were.  Two years ago, both sides implicitly recognised that. Nobody was winning and nobody losing. The conflict was just pottering bloodily on, in increasing futility. So there was a halt (perhaps, says my wise copper, only the first of several as the lessons are gradually learned). But time, in the passing, is another enemy here. Men with guns and politicians with restive constituencies forget. They load back the unreality. George Mitchell becomes a strolling player, not a saviour. The words of hope become ever more strained, the deadlines ever more malleable.  The devil of the situation, though, is that the truth of our impotence in all its bleakness can never be voiced openly by those who understand. Neither Tony Blair nor Mo Mowlam can admit the inability of the state apparatus they control to impose a solution - and the Conservatives have all too swiftly forgotten what they learned through 18 bitter years.  The ordinary people of Northern Ireland are left darkling among the posturers and the bigots. The ordinary voters of the rest of the UK are given no chance to tell the minority over the water what they think should be done.  Real news? Real news gives you the real options and the real assessments - and confronts you with the real decisions. Real news gags on the surface show and shrugs off facile connections to four frightened lads in Dungannon. Real news deals in the fundamentals of life and death. Harder than hard, truer than truer. But there isn't, it seems, much of it around - at Six or any other spot on the clock.