THE Northern Ireland peace process is extremely delicate and fraught with difficulties and dangers. Everything is deadly complicated.

However, there should be one simple starting point for Unionists and Republicans: do you want peace? Peace, the ultimate goal, is often forgotten about in the peace process as the various parties squabble like children over a perceived slight.

Indeed, if the parties really are committed to peace, the latest crisis in the process could eventually move it forward.

Sinn Fein is right. The police raid on its offices in Stormont was dramatised for the TV cameras in a heavy-handed and politically-motivated way. This should not have happened - the chief constable has apologised for it - and it is understandable that Republicans may have had their confidence in the new police service dented.

That, though, is a minor matter. It would now appear - and no trials have yet been held and no investigations are yet completed - that there has been espionage on a massive scale being perpetrated by Republicans. Denis Donaldson, Sinn Fein's chief administrator, faces five charges of having information useful to terrorists.

And this is not the end of it. There was the suspicious break-in at Castlereagh police station and there was the IRA's extremely suspicious involvement in Colombia. From all of these instances it is clear that the IRA is still active.

This newspaper has often been dismayed by the backward-looking Unionists and appalled by the offensive biogtry some of their leaders have come out with. But now they have a justified grievance.

That Republicanism has been so caught out is embarrassing to Sinn Fein. Now is Tony Blair's chance to press home the advantage and demand that Sinn Fein winds up the IRA.

Unionists will have to be grown up and accept that this will be a long, difficult process in itself. They will also have to look at their own violent paramilitaries. But Sinn Fein must now take the lead if it is to restore its credibility.

And it will do just that if it is committed to peace - and if the Unionists are mature enough to coax it along the dangerous path.

In yesterday's debate at Stormont, Monica McWilliams of the Women's Coalition - which speaks with a voice free from the bigotry, hatred and divisions which mar the rest of Ulster politics - said: ''The loser in this will not be the security services, the IRA, the Ulster Unionists, Sinn Fein or any political party, it will be the people of Northern Ireland. We have an obligation to make it work for them, all sections of them, and when it stops working, to find ways to make it work again."

Put simply: the people want peace - do the politicians?