It’s clear that Beattie for all his outspokenness remains onside of the British Army, as they still allow him to blog on the Army’s website in Helmand.  Why 27 years in the army and only a captain although decorated for gallantry? Because he started out in the ranks. Typical Prod, he was no slavish admirer of his boss, the equally opinionated Col Tim Collins. If no man is an idol to his valet, no battalion commander is charismatic to his RSM, as he describes it in his own account. 

Beattie, who was Collins’s regimental sergeant major at the time he made the famous speech, claims that, far from rousing his men, it made them fearful and apprehensive and it was left to him to “snap them out of it” by “bollocking them”. Collins’s speech was a brilliant, almost Shakespearian piece of battlefield oratory, and many will not like having it knocked down. By contrast, Beattie says, “like most Ulstermen my language is straight out of the gutter”. Yet it is this that makes this memoir such a riveting read.

I wonder what it was like overhearing the two of them in the tent, each trying to cap the other’s best lines?

Regional broadcasters are understandably lobbying hard these days, when devolution in national politics is being mirrored in the politics of broadcasting.  It’s a issue that produces great clouds of fog from both sides and some changes in governance to appease the politicians, but the hard fact is that the likely returns shouldn’t be exaggerated.  Have no illusions, good ideas wanted by the networks will remain king, rather than local job creation. Again, portrayal and production are two different elements. Two big programmes tonight illustrate the difference. The drama blockbuster airing tonight “Mo “about Mo Mowlam as Secretary of State will portray Northern Ireland vividly at a key moment in recent history. I don’t know the production details but its genesis is in the ITV drama centre. There are jobs for local actors, extras and probably a few technicians. Perhaps a little investment by NI Screen  has been put in. But by no means can it be called an NI production. 
Take the less obvious example of the BBC1 series Seven Ages of Britain presented by David Dimbleby launching tonight. BBC NI has an all-Ireland brief but will Ireland be represented? (Please forebear to comment about the “Britain”). If so, this enhances portrayal but is unlikely to produce much work locally, if any. Yet British, Irish and international themes are always worth targeting by local managements for a local look-in or contribution.

Drama is the Big One where the fashion for movie-scale production far exceeds the capacity of BBC NI to continue to resource it.  Locally hosted drama requires much outside resourcing and investment. While much of it has enjoyed high impact success, it has never satisfied union demands for more local high value jobs. Partly this is because the existing skills base is too small. But how can it grow unless the commissions come in? And so the argument is circular. Strains are evident in the departure of BBC NI’s head of drama. The accompanying annoucement from BBC local head Peter Johnson sounds quite a gamble: “

The reorganisation of the BBC Northern Ireland drama department is likely to see it focus more on indigenous drama and concentrate its activities in Belfast.” 

  Can this strategy succeed?  Peter Johnson has yet to explain how.

To increase production, the fair question is asked: do programmes made in NI need to be about Ireland?  The answer is a cautious no.  BBCNI should blow the trumpet more loudly for its centre of current affairs excellence which produced the Panorama on Irisgate as a version of the local Spotlight. They tackle non- Irish subjects too. Some examples of non-Irish themes satisfy neither the demands of portrayal nor production, like the BBC4 discussion series Dinner with Portillo which lacks the slightest NI connection on screen.  A little production supervision and the BBCNI brass plate at the end are added to give a dubious impression of an addition to an NI production record.

If behind the lobbying there are hopes of formal regional quotas in broadcasting, they are doomed. They have certainly failed in the past. Major TV production is a hugely expensive business in the digital age and the idea of the region hosting hugh volume large scale production is an illusion.  On a smaller scale, broadcasters like UTV and Macmillan with their strong record on the front line stand every chance of winning contracts for ITV local news Scotland and Wales. Local unions and companies will never be satisfied, naturally enough. But the message has to be, if you play to your strengths and build up your local base, you stand a chance of success. “Success” can hardly be dominance.  The suggested target of a 3% share of total network output for Northern Ireland to reflect the population ratio, seems random and overambitious to me. Whatever the realisitic ambition, to rely on the political route is to risk disillusion and failure.

Despite the spin, the UCUNF project does appear to face real difficulties. As Davy Gordon writes:

There is a cold, old-fashioned logic to the calls for unionist pacts, and it is clearly a tempting prospect for some in the UUP.

Unionist unity would be likely to play well on the doorsteps, and could wrest Westminster seats from nationalists and the First Minister’s desk from Martin McGuinness.

But even showing an interest in such a direction calls the rhetoric of the Tory link-up into doubt.

How can you not take sides if you are thinking of moving towards a pan-unionist front with the Orange Order cheering you on?

Cameron should also be aware of the potential risks to him from the speculation of recent days. He has made much of moving his party to a socially liberal position.

Whatever old-guard views may still exist in his rank-and-file, the Conservative leader will not be hitting out at single mothers or pandering to homophobia. Those kinds of views would be toxic to his cause.

So would he be able to live with a three-in-the-bed scenario with the DUP? And what does all the unionist unity speculation do for the Westminster principle of bipartisanship on Northern Ireland?

Elsewhere, on a slightly related topic, Bobballs writes: I am hearing on good authority that the DUP has suspended all Westminster selections until further notice. This is as a result of ‘pact’ talks.

She continued:

“It exposes the inherent problems in the system of governance in the North of Ireland, the D’Hondt system, in that it rewards people from the extremes and does not reward people who bring together communities and serve all of the people within their communities. While we continue to prop up a dysfunctional system, frankly it will never work and there will be crisis after crisis.”

Collins:

That is the nub of the problem. The Belfast Agreement enshrined a dysfunctional society’s sectarian divisions into governmental institutions. To be fair, there wasn’t any obvious alternative around at the time and the hope was that normal political activity would gradually evolve as the political representatives of unionism and nationalism shared power and developed some basis of trust in each other.

Instead, however, the opposite happened as suspicions grew and festered in the years after 1998. For that, Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair must take a large share of the blame. Having put an enormous amount of work into constructing the hugely complex agreement, they then proceeded to abandon the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists to appease their more extreme rivals.

Although, I think, this account exaggerates the importance of the switch in external patronage to the misfortunes of the two centre parties (they were eaten by other more internal contradictions, not least in the case of the SDLP its possibly erroneous sense of ownership of the Belfast Agreement), the addiction to it is clear enough from the way this dumb show (all picture and no sound) farce at Hillsborough played out.

As I pointed out in the Comment is Free piece yesterday, this is a piece of business OFMdFM were given extra resources to deal with. Having consumed those resources to zero effect (rent seeking behaviour par excellence), the two have drawn in Gordon Brown and the Taoiseach who has more pressing matters of national interest to attend to, after Sinn Fein insisted on externalising their domestic problems.

Judging by the lack of content in the briefings being given to the mainstream media, this has been less a matter of formal rounds of negotiation with their attendant paper trails (which at least create some cohesive sense on what has been achieved and what has not), and more in the nature of relationship management, with the main purpose of the rounds being more allowing tempers to cool rather than creating space for progress.

Collins makes this observation:

In the years after 1998, Sinn Féin perfected the art of spinning out the process time after time in order to get what it wanted, while marginalising the SDLP. It succeeded magnificently in those two objectives but the tinkering with the process became an end in itself. The party has not been nearly as successful in exercising power as it was in art of peace-processing. A byproduct of its interminable negotiating strategy was that the electorate in the Republic simply lost interest in its activities.

Another unintended consequence of its strategy has been that the DUP learned the lessons only too well and proceeded to copy the Sinn Féin tactic of putting process before real politics. Each party has got what it deserved in the other but the people who live in Northern Ireland have to put up with the consequences.

Collins, rather too darkly IHMO, concludes that cutting the whole system off might give the politicians pause for thought, and give the British and Irish governments moment to to listen to the Northern Irish people. But no democratic institution can afford to drift this far from the concerns of its people…

At some point, there may be a need to rip it up and start again…

For those of us who dealt with the IRA – and I don’t want to minimise it, each act was wicked and wrong and to be deplored -  the terrorism the IRA was engaged in was directed towards a political purpose – maybe unjustified – but it was in a certain framework you could understand. The point about (9/11) was that if they could have killed 30,000 (instead of 3,000) they would have…. This changed the calculus of risk.”

Is he right to credit our paramilitaries with natural restraint rather than limited capacity?  Blair was well established in office when the Twin Towers were attacked.  He and the rest of us were perhaps lucky that he came to power at a time when the IRA were amenable to renewing the ceasefire although still prepared to strike. This was a natural negotiation moment.  I wonder how Blair would have handled the collapse of 1969, the emergence of the armed insurgency and the communal violence that accompanied it?  Would he have incanted: “you mustn’t give in to to terrorism, it’s the right thing to do” and acted accordingly?

At the inquiry Blair repeated the old warrior’s error of fighting the last war instead of the next one. The most worrying part of his “2010 vision ” was not his hypothetical belief that a Saddam left alone might be in a position today to impose a nuclear blackmail. It was that Blair would be prepared to do it all again to Iran. He’s a great one for reading across lessons that don’t directly apply, from al Qaida to Iraq and now to Iran. What a relief he wasn’t around to give into the temptation of treating Northern Ireland as the first of Blair’s just wars. 

There are also parents, rightly angry and worried about their children.  People are now backtracking through the years, wondering if their children have come into contact with perpetrators - and they are also rightly questioning if they trust the people they know now.  This is a massive issue, and it is a disgrace that alleged child abusers have had free reign to have access to other children.  Collectively, we now know more about the issue of sex offenders and reoffending rates.  It is likely that perpetrators do not rehabilitate by just simply moving on somewhere else.  We know as republicans of a number of cases being discussed at present – is this just the tip of the iceberg?  How many more children have been put at risk as a result of mishandling, and in some cases planned facilitation of moving people around the country?

I also want to make it clear, paedophilia is not restricted to members of the Republican Movement.  Unfortunately, paedophiles ingratiate themselves in all walks of life.  In some instances they are our relatives, friends, priests, professionals, community and youth workers, lawyers, teachers, doctors – the list is endless.  No one is blaming the republican movement for members of that movement who inflicted sexual abuse on others. 

The blame, however is rightly centred around how the republican movement dealt with the issue, in several cases.  It is clear from these cases that not once did the people involved either in so called investigating or in listening, directly report to any of the authorities. They also retraumatised victims of sexual abuse by either their chosen action, or inaction.  It is also abundantly clear, for anyone who wishes to take the blinkers off, that paedophiles have been able to move around the country and further afield.  In some cases they continued to masquerade as republicans, which in turn afforded them protection, or at the very least a degree of trust, which then also in turn made it easier for them to do what they did, unchecked.  That is disgraceful, and brings a deep sense of shame on anyone who continues to support the republican ideology.  The fault for this lies squarely with those in positions of power who espoused themselves as the epitome of republicanism, individuals who were looked up to by some, and who now feel tarnished by that association.

There are people out there now who have knowledge in different parts of Ireland on similar allegations of sexual abuse.  Are you one of them?  There are also people who have heard things on the grapevine about similar alleged cover-ups.  Again, does this apply to you? 

By not speaking out, you allow yourself to become complicit in the same alleged collective cover-up.  I am appealing directly to all republicans from all persuasions to tell what you know.  No perpetrator should be allowed to continue to abuse.  No movement should give them succour by shielding them.  And no republican should sit on the fence on this issue, waiting on other victims to come forward in the hope that the full story should start to emerge.

Be proactive.  Do not continue with the legacy of silence.  Out all the cases of child and adult sexual abuse.  Highlight any suspicion, or knowledge of cover ups.  Do this through whatever channel is comfortable for you.  An email has been set up, by myself to deal with this issue.  If this is an avenue you feel comfortable with using, use it.

I also want to directly appeal to those still within Sinn Fein.  I am aware that some of you refuse to believe that this happened at all.  People will make up their own minds on the issue.  However, as a human, there has to be a shadow of doubt in your mind.  Ask the hard questions, and demand an answer.  If you are not happy, demand again.  No one can afford to put politics over the safety of children.  As a human being, you cannot afford to stay silent on this issue.  Do the right thing.

Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Is mise le meas

*******  Cahill

Background

EXCLUSIVE - Gerry Adams ignored two more rape victims

Grand-niece of Provo legend endured horrific sexual abuse

Sinn Fein denies mishandling abuse claim

‘Article was accurate and truthful account’ – rape victim

In England and Wales, this suburban menace was addressed by the 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act. In 2004, Lady Sylvia Hermon asked Westminster to extend the act to Northern Ireland, which under direct rule usually means little more than applying the rubber stamp.

In 2005, the NIO went as far as holding a high hedge consultation exercise, attracting 640 replies. But then it did nothing, because this is precisely the sort of issue that London thinks we should sort out by ourselves.

The chance to do just that came in 2007 with the full restoration of the assembly. Straight away, new DUP environment minister Sammy Wilson examined the high hedge question - and decided it would have to wait until after council reorganisation in 2011, as enforcement will be a local council affair.

But in 2009, Mr Wilson was replaced with Edwin Poots, who vowed to have a law in place before council reorganisation. He raised the issue immediately on assuming office last July, announced a bill last September and put a draft out to consultation two weeks ago.

Somewhere in the middle of this he may also have changed his mind on the need for council reorganisation, but we’ll skip over that to avoid complication.

How can our huge and costly political system take so long and make such a fuss over passing a 15-page local law, little more than a by-law really, that Westminster could have run off the photocopier for us 7 years ago?

Perhaps because that’s the point. Stormont is supposed to work like this, drawing everyone into its labyrinthine structures. It’s not about getting things done, it’s about getting certain people to do them. And what better subject than hedges to show how slowly and neatly our political class has been enclosed.

Argument for: 
Danger signals have been evident for over a year. The dynamic of the St Andrews Act was clearly for J&P completion by mid -08 and implementation of language and equality measures.  Delay meant a deepening crisis, mediation was always going to be needed.

Argument against
All of the above was local business and an acid test of the 2006 devolution deal. It had to be tested to destruction. If still no deal, let a party resign and have an election. This is democracy at work.  Are the DUP privately ruing the day they demanded scrapping the Secretary of State’s power to suspend the Assembly?.

After an election, what then?
It depends on the results. If the DUP remain the largest party we pick up where we left off.  Ditto with if a united unionist party is formed. Legally could a unionist grouping short of a party nominate for FM? Probably not without a change in the law (unlikely) but has any authority pronounced?.  I f Sinn Fein are the largest party, conventional wisdom says collapse is inevitable.

Hold on. Are there really no alternatives to collapse?

Maybe. Ulster Unionists might accept an SF FM. Trimble (who he?) has said UUs could overhaul the DUP in votes. He described the FM primacy as “symbolic,” implying that the UUP might live with it. Both assumptions are fantasy ( or probably mischief)

Should the Assembly try to reform itself?

Argument for
The Assembly review committee did a good job on the details of J&P. It should act more boldly as a ginger group to end deadlocks.  A scheduled review of this Assembly could be brought forward and submitted to the governments. With expert help, the committee might tackle the question:  in the present coalition system, should a convention of government be developed, whereby the manifestos of leading parties are implemented as a matter of course, provided they don’t clash directly with the other side?

Argument against
There’s no way a divided Assembly can reform itself further. Other reforms seem even less viable eg allowing designations rather than parties to nominate FM or the radical reform of voluntary coalition.

What next?
No early second election. Back to the drawing board but the governmenrts will not abandon the Assembly idea. By themselves, structures won’t solve the problem. Big issues are:

Would a voluntary coalition be acceptable in the medium term or has the pitch been fatally queered?.
The conviction that a voluntary coalition is designed to dish Sinn Fein is probably immovable. Pity, because SF’s position would remain unaffected but some pressure for flexibility could be introduced.

Would government at council level work, with a direct rule ministry?  (Jim Molyneaux’s dream come true!)
Probably, but what an anti-climax.
Look at that photo of the two premiers in the back seat of the car with their seat belts on. Is this the picture of things to come - joint authority carefully not called joint sovereignty? It would retain all the real “British values,” elections to Westminster, the NHS, the armed forces, the BBC. And remember, the UK pays for nearly everything and he who pays the piper calls the tune. Irishness in the form of a language act and equality bill would be quickly implemented.

Question for the DUP: Is it worth letting the Assembly collapse for all that?

Would any change of habits help?
It surely might. Parties operating as secretive quasi-stalinist systems cancel each other out. They have to acquire better habits of democracy.  The DUP are the worse obvious offenders currently, slapping down the Sinn Fein agenda they agreed to consider after St Andrews and spurning much of the machinery of modern democracy, like rights and the involvement of civil society. Perhaps their behaviour bears the marks of a longer struggle inside the unionist camp compared to Sinn Fein’s easier ousting of the SDLP.  Perhaps if all MLAs give themselves more time, the pressures of government on 108 members will begin to overtake the habit of harvesting votes as the only real imperative.  All parties need to learn how genuine engagement and consultation help to tackle big problems like secondary school transfer. To be generous to them, they’ve come a long way from murderous confrontation, but not far enough.

They could resume the task by sharing the lift.

In the case of the Belfast agreement the key element dealt with by this fudging was IRA decommissioning. While Unionists clearly believed they had extracted a deadline for delivery, SF quite rightly returned to the issue stating they, as a political party, had only committed to encouraging decommissioning. This ambiguity allowed them to enter later negotiations and extract gains in return for delivering what others believed had already been paid for.

When the St Andrew’s negotiations came about the DUP learnt from this SF tactic and built in their own ambiguity on devolution of Policing and Justice. While SF believed they had a commitment and timetable, the DUP rightly pointed out they were only bound to working towards that timetable.  Now we see the DUP using removal of that ambiguity as an opportunity to extract a concession.

SF are currently being played at a game they started and are expressing the same frustration Unionism expressed in a similar situation.

It is hardly surprising the two key parties attempting to resolve the impasse at Hillsborough are finding things such hard going. Both have stung and been stung by clever negotiation and arguments on what was agreed over what was assumed/believed. Neither party is likely to get away with screwing the other or miss an attempt at screwing them this time.

They are finally forced from an era of clever negotiating and ‘constructive ambiguity’ to a political prisoners’ dilemma. Time to decide can they actually deliver a deal that does what it says on the tin for both – a first. Unsurprising they are finding it so difficult and painfully slow.

Fudge won’t work this time.

There is little doubt they have been talking and crunching detail (making up for their “lost” three years). Although there is a sense that they have made progress on the core problem of the devolution of policing and justice, it is the ancillary problems – most notably, the issue of parades – they seem stuck on.

The flexible deadline is an old tactic in Northern Irish politics. While the two sides are still talking, there is hope. But we are now into the favourite game of the peace process era: political chicken! Whoever walks first, loses – and gets landed with the blame of breaking the deal.

This afternoon Sinn Féin have gone back to their party officers, which may indicate the narrow brief given their negotiating team may already have been breached.

In the meantime, although the DUP is keeping very tightlipped on the talks, questions are being asked as to who blabbed to the BBC about the Orange Order’s attempt at convening all unionist talks before Christmas. It may be the party is not so absorbed in the charmless burlesque at Hillsborough not to be able create a little trouble for their Ulster Unionist rivals.

However for the purposes of this column, I am going to focus on the extraordinary work of his brother Dara Vallely, also a painter but better known as the founder of the Armagh Rhymers, who are carrying on an ancient tradition of masked ‘mumming’ that is mentioned in the Táin Bó Cuailgne (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) and is even depicted in the prehistoric cave paintings of south-west France. This unique theatre in education group now consists of three men – Dara, Peter Shortall and Steve Lally from Kildare (who joined them recently after the death last year of Brendan Bailey) – who put on around 300 performances in schools, theatres and cultural centres (and even at weddings) every year all over Ireland, in Britain, Europe and North America.

The group was born 32 years ago, when Dara brought together six unemployed men from the Craigavon area – all of them involved in folk music – to train to be mummers as part of an ACE community employment scheme.  The others who attended this course were Tony Lavery, Paul McKerr and Tass MacAtasney. They started to tour schools in the Armagh area with their first folk plays. Their repertoire has now grown to 13 or 14 plays for adults and children, with names like The Enormous Turnip, The Navan Dragon and The Giant’s Garden. Their ‘Mummers Play’ can be performed with up to 80 children in a workshop format, and is in the form of a traditional County Armagh mummers show, including music and poetry by Seamus Heaney, John Montague and John Hewitt.

This is pure folk theatre, done for the love of the mumming tradition which is particularly strong in Armagh (and also in Kerry, where it manifests itself particularly every St Stephen’s Day with the ‘hunting of the wren’). It’s just as well, because throughout the 1980s the group received little or nothing in either official recognition or funding for their cross-community, cross-border performances. 

In recent years they have received some of the recognition they richly deserve, with small but decent funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and from Foras na Gaeilge for their plays in Irish. They have also gained an international reputation, representing Europe in the World Childrens Festival in Seoul, Korea; and being seen on stages in France, Belgium, Germany, Canada and the US, where this year they will be a headline act at the Milwaukee Irish Festival for the 12th year. In Dublin they gave the first ever live theatre performance in the National Museum and performed in Croke Park and at the World Archaeological Congress in UCD.  They have played at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and Cité de la Musique in Paris. 

Back in Belfast they have performed in schools from Ardoyne (where they used to be regularly stopped and searched by the British Army) to the Shankill Road, from Rathcoole to the Falls Road. Typically, they would go into a Protestant school on one day and invite the pupils from the local Catholic school to attend, and the following day would travel the short distance to the Catholic school and bring the Protestant children with them (in the last week of January, for example, they were doing this in two townlands west of Castlederg in County Tyrone). In the past five years they have performed with or in front of more than 100,000 people – the vast majority of them in Ireland – including 70,000 children. They get their young audiences and workshop groups involved in their plays with the words: “we’ll tell you a story but we can’t do it without your help.”

Their latest two-part initiative is a partnership with the Armagh Observatory. The first part, organized with astronomer Dr Miruna Popescu of the Observatory, brings together seven schools in the county to work on a play called ‘The Farmer of the Night’. The second, funded by the EU PEACE III programme, will link seven schools in the North and seven in the South, Protestant and Catholic, to work on a series of shows emphasizing the interconnectedness of science and art.

So where are all the newspaper features and radio and TV programmes about the Armagh Rhymers, the most widely seen folk theatre ensemble in Ireland?  You will be hard pushed to find them. Our Belfast and Dublin-centred media are largely uninterested in the amazing creativity and child-centred theatrical output of three quiet men from County Armagh. But maybe it’s just as well: when Dara Vallely approached the Department of Education in Northern Ireland some years ago for support, the officials were full of praise for the group’s work. However they went on to advise them strongly not to draw attention to themselves, for fear that their daily routine of bringing schools together across the sectarian divide for mumming shows might lead to objections from the usual bigoted quarters and to the children being banned from seeing these extraordinarily life-affirming dramas!

Andy Pollak

Here’s the longer version with contributions from the scientists involved. From JPL news

Meanwhile, the second Mars rover, Opportunity, continues to traverse the Martian surface.

“In his capacity as Ulster Unionist leader, Sir Reg Empey regularly meets all strands of opinion throughout Northern Ireland.  He referred ‘in passing’ to a meeting, requested in October and held in December, but I was not aware of the content or the participants.
“As there was nothing of consequence arising from the meeting he did not mention it to me again.  Sir Reg Empey has made clear to me that it has no bearing on our joint determination to stand together as ‘Conservatives and Unionists’ at the forthcoming Westminster elections to bring national, mainstream and non-sectarian politics to Northern Ireland.”

A Tory source in London told Slugger that Cameron’s 18 seat strategy remains intact…

...republicans are in a rather worse position than the SDLP. The settlement in Northern Ireland is essentially Hume-ite. It accepts the province’s place in the union as the consequence of majority sentiment freely expressed, but it doesn’t let that majority actually do anything democratically in any devolved intuitions. Hence mandatory power-sharing, or more precisely, election-discounting devolution is the order of the day. This is not what Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness presided over 30 years of terrorism to achieve. It is what Hume told them 30 years ago they’d end up settling for. And it leaves the republican leadership with a near-unanswerable problem in terms of managing its base.

But what makes the republican leadership so odd is precisely what binds them together in the first place: atavistic nationalism. You can forgive “your side” virtually anything if you hate the other side enough. But that’s the problem Adams and McGuinness face and can’t escape from. They’ve sold their unionist-phobic supporters “the process” not on the Hume-ite basis that it represents a “shared present” on the best terms possible, pending the day at some point in the demographic future when all this sort of thing can be dispensed with. Rather, they’ve consistently oversold it as being part of an inevitablist triumph.

Thus, on matters like policing and justice, Sinn Féin has repeatedly lied to its own supporters that a date for transfer from Westminster to Stormont was both negotiated and agreed. It’s beyond non-republicans like me why anyone falls for this inside the laager, but there you are. From this willed self-delusion, Sinn Féin has proceeded to try to hold the entire process to ransom by saying that unless what it failed to do constitutionally and democratically – negotiate a transfer date, for example – happens retrospectively, it will attempt to destroy the entire settlement by withdrawing from it.