Down at the wire, the word that fits the Trimble/Adams stand-off is a strange one. Artificial. That's the sense that screams from the positions taken by either side. Both are gripped by what they see as matters of inalienable substance: the substance of arms, of lifelong passion, of sanctified conviction, of justified mistrust, above all the substance of history. Could any two men on the face of the planet be deeper dug in behind impermeable rocks of actuality? But when you look at it, what their argument most seems is unreal. Consider Mr Trimble and his party. They have already come a long way. They wanted the Good Friday deal, and their leader has taken some risks to keep it alive. They know, also, that the IRA will never give up all its weapons. They knew that all along. It is one of the givens they have learned to tolerate, as they contemplate sitting alongside former killers and torturers on the Northern Ireland executive.  They well understand, even if Sinn Fein-IRA were to hand over some weapons now, and make a pledge on decommissioning later, that arms will remain. The possibility of re-starting hostilities will be there, moving out from arms dumps whose location the IRA has presumably mapped with greater exactness than it did the murder-graves of 20 years ago.  Knowing this, the Ulster Unionists none the less sat down with Sinn Fein-IRA, and talked about a future that, as everyone silently understood, encompassed it. They did this because they believed the process would assist the outcome, saying, in effect, that politics should be allowed to take over, and that this experience in itself would begin to render the arms redundant. This was the point of Good Friday. With the growth of politics, battle would finally cease.  Yet, having swallowed all that, which required an impressive if long-delayed magnanimity on the Unionists' part, they are now balking. They can't make the final stride. They refuse to let the executive start functioning unless this is preceded by some tiny sign from the other side. The camel is digested, but the gnat sticks immovably in the throat.  Republicans too, however, are masters of the artificial point. By offering this tiny sign, they would lose nothing. The scenario which the Unionists have privately conceded acknowledges that some weaponry would always, in the real world, remain. Certainly a great deal of it would still be there next week and next month if, this week, the IRA were to meet Mr Blair's deadline and launch a decommissioning process. For all that is asked of them, to keep momentum going, is a token, in effect a nullity, a symbolic act: a gesture of entirely artificial importance.  Yet they cannot do it. And people humour them in the not-doing of it. They established some time ago, especially among mainland opinion that is anywhere close to the government, that they could not be expected to do it. History entirely ruled it out. Those of us who wrote in the opposite sense - said that some little gesture of symbolic disarming was a sine qua non which Unionists were entitled to rely on - were given lectures about our regrettable insensitivity and our woeful lack of realism.  Sinn Fein-IRA has, like the Unionists, come quite far. It accepted the consent principle, protecting the democratic rights of the Ulster majority. It complied with the impulse in Dublin to redefine the constitutional objective of a united Ireland. It embarked on a process which implicitly conceded that its departed heroes had fought and died in a struggle that could no longer be won by military means.  But Mr Adams too, like Mr Trimble, goes to the wire quite willing, it would seem, to jeopardise all this by his resistance to a very small point. Actually, of the two, Sinn Fein's sabotage, if this is what it proves to be, is the more culpable. It has seized more, while offering less. It has got many of its killers out of prison early, but is not prepared even to urge that decommissioning should happen. While insisting on its separateness from the IRA, it will not expend so much as a single word telling the IRA what it thinks it should do.  Sinn Fein, in other words, will take hardly any risks. We assume that Mr Adams is desperate for Good Friday to survive, but he exhibits no equivalent public urgency. While goading Mr Trimble to take one more risk, he affects to believe that for his part it is not within his power to take the one everyone wants him to, because he continues to shelter behind the claim - the insulting fiction - that he carries no influence with the IRA. Judged by where it now stands, the negotiation has been one-sided in the concessions made, while sustaining the ridiculous pretence that any party close to a paramilitary group could not bring about sufficient decommissioning to allow the peace process to continue and the institutions to start work  All the same, the points at issue remain definable by that word: artificial. Taking the process as a whole, their reality does not accord in any way with the scale of the prize that is otherwise available. Both sides have expended great effort, alongside the British and Irish governments, to achieve a change that has eluded these islands for 30 years - to name but the most recent fragment of time. It would now take only a small shift by either or both of them to enable the larger deal to make a measure of progress.  It is tempting to say this has to come from Sinn Fein. For while it is certainly easier to say what Mr Trimble should do - to tell him, with lofty disregard for his viability as leader of a functioning party, to move ahead without any decommissioning gesture from the other side -Sinn Fein's recalcitrance has been the more unyielding, and therefore the more culpably calamitous for the project its leaders want to see succeed.  What is more striking than the fault to be found in one side or the other, however, is the failure they share: their absence of perspective in the end-game. Must the gnats have another accursed victory? This is what today and tomorrow will have to be about. A venture that has seen, from all sides, a fair amount of largeness - reluctant and chippy and unadmitted, but also large - is in danger of collapsing round points that are not, in the broad scheme of things already accomplished, either large or real. Perhaps this is a definition of the Irish problem. But that is what seemed so close to being re-defined.