Unity by 2016:.

(From Irish Independent)

What's the secret Sinn Fein game plan after this week's historic destruction of arms? Justine McCarthy reports

When the IRA attempted to decimate the British Tory party by bombing its conference hotel in Brighton in 1984, one of the Provos' younger recruits heard the news in his cell in the Maze Prison. It was said that Conor Murphy had been stirred into joining the Provisionals by the 1981 IRA hunger strike in the Maze. Less than a year after Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone, died on his 66th day without food, Conor Murphy was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for IRA membership and possession of explosives.

Next week, on the 21st anniversary of the Brighton bomb, which killed five people, the former prisoner, having taken Seamus Mallon's seat for Newry & Armagh in last May's Westminster elections, will address a gathering at the Conservative Party conference, by invitation. His message to them will be that they must become persuaders for a United Ireland.

Never has a week in politics been so seismically truncated as has this one. In the space of 48 hours, since last Monday's confirmation of IRA arsenal decommissioning, the national question had leap-frogged from 'How many guns have you got?' to 'How soon will Ireland be re-united?' While Ian Paisley was busy blustering for the Union after John de Chastelain's announcement, Sinn Fein was already embarked on Part Two of its own peace process strategy. By lunchtime on Wednesday, Conor Murphy was addressing a fringe audience down the street from the British Labour Party's annual conference in Brighton.

"The core problem remains Britain's involvement in Irish affairs," he told them. "We must plan in a structured way for the ending of partition and the establishment of a truly united country on the island." He said British people had to help Irish republicans to convince the North's unionists that "their future is best secured within the context of a united and independent Ireland".

Even those who always knew that Sinn Fein's map of the political landscape stretched far beyond the horizons of the Good Friday Agreement have been taken aback at how quickly the party has upped the ante in the gameplan. Chief negotiator Martin McGuinness had his bags packed for Washington to disseminate the reunification gospel on Capitol Hill as Gerry Adams arrived at Government Buildings last Friday to meet the Taoiseach and his foreign and justice ministers, ostensibly to confirm that de Chastelain would rubber-stamp the weapons decommissioning.