The father had soldiered famously for his cause, was jailed, and came out as a big man in the Provisional Irish Republican Army. His teenage son also had struck a name for himself, but as a big nuisance in West Belfast.

About a year ago, the son stole a car and crashed it. Wasn't the first time, either. The people in the neighborhood warned him to straighten out.

"Eff off," he answered. He was thought to have graduated from joyriding to stick-ups.

Under normal circumstances, an apprentice hood such as this would have been punished with a republican bullet in the leg. But the matter was brought to his father, out of respect for his stature.

The father talked to his son about the damage a bullet does to the shin.

"Eff off," said the son. "You can't be doing this," said the father, who had spent a chunk of the son's youth in prison.

"Eff off," said the son. "You and your war. What did it get you? You did your bit. What good did you do with your years sleeping in a jail?"

That was a long year ago. By now, we have heard some of the obvious reasons for the IRA ceasefire announced on Wednesday: American investment, unity among Irish nationalists, flexibility on the part of the British. They are true, in their way.

But here is a small reason, also true: A generation of IRA men now are getting their lives mashed back into their faces by their teenage sons. The middle-aged men ran a war that they grew up with and went to jail for. They returned home to half-grown children. The children of prisoners are bored with politics. They'd rather joyride.

"The young kids, the hoods, are rebelling against what the fathers are doing," notes Rita Higgins, a nationalist originally from the Short Strand section of Belfast.

"It's like a lost generation. Maybe it's something every generation does. But years ago, if you had a young fella who went joyriding, who was anti-establishment, they could work with him and channel that into the movement. Not now."

The Irish republican war cannot be handed off to a generation that does not want it. And the IRA soldiers themselves have grown up.

"The IRA has matured and they see that they couldn't win this way," said Higgins. "Years ago, we were dreaming about a socialist republic. People were looking to Cuba and Russia and Nicaragua and all the rest. We'd be boat people now if it had worked. Now, the revolutionary ideologies have gone away. Twenty years ago, you'd still have homes without toilets. The housing is very much improved. The social and economic situation has improved. Sinn Fein [the IRA's political party] is doing local housing issues. The republicans have a tremendous cohesiveness and maturity from this struggle."

If Northern Ireland has a Martin Luther King, his name is John Hume. He comes from the city of Derry, where the war began and long ago burned out. Hume made a revolution without guns. Half a lifetime ago, he sat down in front of a British tank when the commander broke a promise to pull back his troops and let Catholic demonstrators go home. He was hosed with purple dye and jailed. And he has made his city as peaceful as Staten Island.

The IRA and Sinn Fein are hardly the only ones to speak for the Catholics of Northern Ireland. About 80 percent of the Catholics back Hume's party, the Social Democratic Labor Party.

Derry is a majority Catholic city, but because of gerrymandering, it had never had a Catholic mayor until Hume led the civil rights fight. Now Catholics control the city council, which picks the mayor. And the mayor's job is rotated between Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists, at Hume's insistence.

When Gerry Adams wanted to bring Sinn Fein towards the political center, he began by talking to his fiercest rival - John Hume. "It was my public duty to talk," said Hume. "Given that five British governments have not succeeded in achieving a cessation of violence, given that 20,000 troops have not succeeded, given that 12,000 armed police have not succeeded - if dialogue could do it, then you have a duty to do it."

On Wednesday, after the ceasefire announcement, there was a gathering at the Dublin residence of Jean Kennedy Smith, the U.S. ambassador to Ireland. She spoke of those who had died. One of the U.S delegation brought a sheet of paper with a poem, "Sometimes," by a Welsh writer named Sheenagh Pugh. A friend had seen it on a placard in the London subway. It seemed to have been written for a day when war was ending:

  Sometimes things don't go, after
    all,
  from bad to worse. Some years,
    muscadel
  faces down frost; green thrives; the
    crops don't fail,
  sometimes a man aims high, and
    all goes well.


  A people sometimes will step back
    from war;
  elect an honest man; decide they
    care
  enough, that they can't leave some
    stranger poor.
  Some men become what they were
    born for.


  Sometimes our best efforts do not
    go 
  amiss; sometimes we do as we
    meant to.
  The sun will sometimes melt a
    field of sorrow
  that seemed hard frozen: may it
    happen for you.

(Copyright Sheenagh Pugh, 1990; Dufour Press, Philadelphia.)