There was a key exchange in the impressive community centre in Galbally, east Tyrone, on Saturday night that indicates that Gerry Adams is winning the policing debate with the republican base.
Galbally is tight republican territory; it's the Crossmaglen of east Tyrone and if you can sell your point there you should be able to sell it at Sunday's extraordinary Sinn Féin Ardfheis on policing, would seem a reasonable summation of what Saturday night was about.
It was an important meeting therefore. Who carried the occasion - whether the Sinn Féin leadership, or, for want of a better word, the dissidents - would be telling.
Adams and a large contingent of senior Sinn Féiners including policing spokesman Gerry Kelly and MEP Bairbre de Brún had just come from the first of these seven public "town hall" debates in Toome, Co Antrim, where Adams and his arguments were generally well received.
There were 700 or more in the audience. As well as Sinn Féin activists and supporters, there were quite a number of former IRA prisoners and quite a number, you can be sure, of IRA members in the hall.
Adams, casually dressed in navy blazer, blue jeans and open-necked white shirt set out the arguments. Republicans must "think big", he said, and they must think strategically. "We are trying to prepare ourselves for political power in this state and in the southern State. It is only with political power that you can actually bring about political change," he told the crowd.
"It is also about trying to bed down the peace, trying to build the peace," he added.
"It isn't about us becoming recruiting sergeants for the PSNI. It isn't about us asking people here to go and drop your arms and embrace a peeler. It is about us defending our communities and making sure that our republican/nationalist people have as of right non-partisan, depoliticised, civic policing," said Mr Adams.
Gerry McGeough was the first from the floor to speak. To applause he said he was proud to have been "an active service volunteer in the IRA's east Tyrone brigade". To a much more muted response he said he was "ashamed to say he was once a member of this Sinn Féin ardchomhairle".
He touched the pressure points, using carefully chosen charged words and phrases about IRA members going to their graves over the "lie" of British withdrawal from Northern Ireland being an inflexible demand, about people being asked to "inform on one another" through the PSNI, about the "Orange bigots" in the police.
"Come clean, Gerry, tell the truth," he said to Adams. "Do you sincerely believe that by recognising the British crown forces - the English crown forces who have brutalised and murdered our people, who have smashed in our doors, who have hassled, drove people into exile, who have beaten us in their interrogation rooms, who have put our people in prisons - that by recognising them now, and without a declaration of intent to withdraw, that we are seriously going to get the Irish republic that so many of us here have struggled for?
"The real reason that you are railroading this issue through right now is simply so that you can look good for the cameras before the elections in the 26 counties in May or June," he added.
"I don't need this motion to go through to look good for the cameras," Mr Adams riposted. It wasn't a bad quip but it died in the community hall. However, he soon had an overwhelming number in the audience firmly on his side as he directly addressed McGeough, and challenged him to put a viable alternative strategy.
"Our job is to develop a strategy to get from where we are at the moment in a divided, partitioned Ireland into a united Ireland," he said.
"I have heard not a whimper of any sense of a strategy from any of the people that are nay-sayers and who are begrudgers on these issues," he added, slowly working up to an angry pitch.
"You also can never pretend - and there is a certain arrogance in this pretence - that republicans are stupid, that republicans are like sheep, that there is some leadership that just flicks a switch and everybody else just rolls over to see what's going. A lot of us have been in this struggle for the past 30 years, and are still in this struggle, and will continue to be in this struggle until we bring it to a successful conclusion. And we are not leading sheep. . ."
His response triggered huge applause. McGeough was his main opponent in the hall on Saturday night, and while in other exchanges with Mr Adams he attempted to go head-to-head with the Sinn Féin president, there was only one winner, and by a clear margin.
But there were some other voices of dissent too. One young man in his late teens or early 20s said simply that the police were the "armed wing of the British government, and I will never accept them in my life".
And later when he got a second chance to speak, he said, "You must be a fool if you think these people [ the police] would not turn their guns on republicans again." Another man who spent over two years "on the blanket" said he just could not get his "head around" how the Sinn Féin leadership was asking members "to wear the criminal uniform of the RUC".
Several other speakers expressed concerns and reservations about policing but perhaps the words from another older man who said he didn't have a "huge ego" reflected the general mood and view: "We need to throw away some of the emotional rhetoric and get the sleeves rolled up and achieve our change. . . I support the strategy of the leadership."
There were also some unsettling questions. If Sinn Féin joined the Policing Board, would republicans have access to details about who the "informers" were, a former IRA prisoner asked. Access to such information would not be automatic, said Mr Kelly.
Another man asked if the captions on the photographs in virtually all police stations of the officers killed in the Troubles would be changed from "killed by terrorists" to "killed in the struggle".
"The honest answer to that is No," said Mr Kelly. "This has been a long conflict, a lot of people have been hurt in it. And we always described the occupiers as the terrorists in this struggle. But people have to grieve. So, if that's the way people are getting through the loss of the people they have lost then I think we should be a bit more wise to the fact that that's what's happening."
In his summation Mr Adams, referring to the young man who said he could never endorse the PSNI, said: "When I was his age I would have said the same thing." Nonetheless, now was the moment and republicans had to be determined and resolute and "think above themselves" on policing, he concluded. Mr Adams was loudly applauded at the end.
