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On the night of August 8 this past summer, the Irish Republican Army threw a party in west Belfast. It was to honor the hundreds of men who had been snared in the British Internment dragnet of 1971, classified as terrorists, and locked away in the "cages" of Long Kesh prison outside Belfast for the next several years. Dress, I was told, would be casual.

The Cages Reunion was convened at an old factory building just off the "Murder Mile" section of the Falls Road and flush against the "peace line," a twenty-foot high, solid-steel fence that separates the Catholic Falls neighborhood from the Protestant Shankill--ground zero of "The Troubles" in the British province of Northern Ireland, a conflict that has taken the lives of some 3,100 people since 1969.

Passing under the watchful eye of a half-dozen security men at the front page, I crossed the flood-lit courtyard and climbed to the reception hall on the second floor. It was a tough-looking crowd. Gathered around long tables were two to three hundred people--mostly men in their late thirties or early forties, with short hair, broad chests, and tattoos on their forearms, working their way through tin pints of Harp lager and mason jars of moonshine. I figured there was a total of about 800 years of jail experience in the room.

The reunion was a celebration both personal and political. Circulating among the tables were several men who had just come out of prison after fifteen or twenty years; they greeted their old comrades-in-arms with bear hugs and shouts of joy, and playfully patted stomachs gone soft or hair gone gray. The gathering was also a reminder that on this night, the twenty-second anniversary of the Internment dragnet that was meant to decapitate the IRA, they were still there, as strong and defiant as ever. Just that afternoon, in fact, several thousand Republican sympathizers had converged on City Hall, the symbolic cradle of Protestant and Loyalist power in Belfast, for an exultant rally.

Yet there was tension in the room, and it centered on Gerry Adams, the head of the IRA's political front group, Sinn Fein. One of the speakers at the City Hall rally. Adams seemed to be getting a rather mixed reception; handshakes and congratulatory backslaps from most, but cold stares from others. A twitchy fellow in the best of times, he seemed particularly ill at ease that night, his gaze flitting about, his smile tightly set. From the bulkiness beneath his tweed jacket, I wondered if, even here, among his comrades, he felt compelled to wear his bulletproof vest.

His wariness was understandable. As front man for the world's most sophisticated guerrilla organization, Adams had always been adept at upholding one of the great fictions of Northern Ireland: that the Provisional IRA was a highly disciplined and unified force, fighting as one unit in its twenty-five-year campaign to end British rule in the province and merge with the Republic of Ireland. While internal schisms and feuds had routinely fractured the IRA's battlefield enemies--both rival Republican factions and those of the Protestant Loyalists fighting to maintain Northern Ireland's union with Great Britain--the "Provos" had always maintained a public image of ironclad cohesion.

That image was now in danger of being shattered. It was common knowledge that Adams had recently been meeting with Irish government officials and moderate Northern Ireland politicians with a view toward beginning a peace dialogue. What was still very secret, but already rumored among the more militant IRA rank and file, was that these discussions had gone far beyond mere preliminaries, and that Adams was now talking directly with the hated British government--a fact that would be revealed publicly in November and lead to a December agreement between Britain and Ireland that would establish a blueprint for future peace talks.

As early as August, however, IRA extremists saw growing circumstantial evidence of Adam's secret "sellout"; at several gatherings, the Sinn Fein leader had come tantalizingly close to repudiating the IRA's "armed struggle"--a British precondition to formal negotiations--and IRA attacks on British soldiers had become increasingly rare. In the days before the Cages Reunion, I'd heard several Republican militants speak bitterly of Adams's appeasement policy, and of the need to get the shooting war back on track.

That night the tension between the IRA doves and hawks--the "hard men"--promised to reach a new peak. One side effect of the IRA's slide toward civility had been to fuel the long-held suspicions of Protestant Loyalists that Britain was working behind their backs to escape the Northern Ireland morass and force them into a united Ireland. For several weeks, Loyalist paramilitaries had pursued a terror campaign against "soft targets" in the Republican community--taking potshots at Sinn Fein councillors, firebombing their homes--in hopes that IRA hard-liners would retaliate with violence and scuttle Adam's peace initiative. That hadn't happened yet, but the ante had been raised by that afternoon's triumphant march on City Hall; finely attuned to the folk traditions of Belfast violence, all those at the reunion expected it would bring some form of Loyalist "revenge."

"The Prods won't let that go unanswered," one celebrant explained. "No question but someone's getting shot tonight."

Shortly after nine o'clock, a young man stepped to the microphone and waved the boisterous crowd to silence. The home of Sinn Fein councillor Bobby Lavery had just been attacked, he announced, sprayed with gunfire from a car; Bobby's oldest son, twenty-one-year-old Sean, had been hit and was being rushed to the hospital. As the revelers responded in shock, Gerry Adams took to the podium and urged everyone to stay calm, to not respond to this latest Loyalist provocation. When the next report came in just before eleven--that Sean was dead from his gunshot wounds--Adams had already left the party.

The lid did not come off that night. It stayed in place for another two months, through the murders of a half-dozen more Catholics by Loyalist gunmen. It did not come off until one Saturday in late October when Thomas Begley, a young IRA Volunteer, walked into a fish-and-chips shop on the Shankill Road placed a brown cardboard box on the counter, and blew himself to pieces. Begley's intended victims, leaders of a Loyalist paramilitary cell headquartered above the shop, escaped. Instead, he butchered nine innocents, including two children, and left fifty-nine more wounded.

For both Loyalist and Republican militants, Begley's bomb was like a gift from a provident God. With the IRA again denounced as a terrorist organization by the British government, with Gerry Adams's fragile peace overtures seemingly ruined, the Irish furies could run free once more. Very quickly, the bodies began to pile up: a couple of Catholic sanitation workers in Belfast, two Catholic brothers sitting in their home at night, then an extravagant slaughter at the Rising Sun pub in the Catholic village of Greysteel, where Loyalist gunmen emptied their automatic rifles into the patrons, leaving seven more dead. In that last week in October--one of the bloodiest weeks in Northern Ireland ever--the world's longest-running war was breathed back to life. Amid much hand-wringing and head-shaking, the soothsayers again proclaimed Northern Ireland a devil's riddle, a brutal little enclave trapped in a whirlpool of sectarian violence, engineered by men who simply would not imagine peace.

But there has always been far too much hand-wringing over Northern Ireland, and assigning its violence to religious hatreds or skewed nationalism or mere senselessness is too easy. In fact, the hard men have a very good reason for wanting to sabotage any prospect of peace, one that has less to do with flags or gods and more to do with money.

From the crest of Blackmountain, there is a remarkable view of Belfast. In the far distance are the middle- and upper-class eastern suburbs, leafy oases largely untouched by The Troubles. Closer in is the city center, ravaged by bombings in the 1970s, but now revitalized, the ornate Victorian City Hall overshadowed by construction cranes and new office buildings. Running south from the center toward Queen's University is Great Victoria Street--the "Golden Mile"--a ribbon of neon lights, expensive restaurants, and nightclubs.