Is the latest impasse in the North really about photographs or is that a ruse to delay a deal until after the UK election, asks Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor.
On Thursday one weary Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) source suggested placing an advertisement in the vacancies section of the newspapers.
"Wanted," it would read. "Creative genius to sort out deadlock over photographs."
Yes, the Progressive Democrats and others are getting excited in the South about Northern republicans in the Oireachtas and about whether the IRA is really prepared to end activity. But up in the bleak North it's still all about the snaps Ian Paisley wants in his family album.
Step forward, Dr Laurence McKeown, who may have a solution. It might involve Ian Paisley going down a hole, but never mind, it might get us all out of a very deep one.
McKeown, a former IRA prisoner, earned his doctorate for his Queen's University thesis, 'Unrepentant Fenian Bastards', a title that suggests he has no intention of parading along the catwalk in a nice little sackcloth-and-ashes number from the House of Paisley. But he knows the republican mindset more than most. He should have been the 11th republican to die on hunger strike. He wanted to see the strike through, but his mother had other ideas. When he lapsed into a coma, she instructed that he be fed intravenously. Thus began the end of a period that tore the emotional guts out of Irish society.
It has been a miserable week in Northern Ireland, but there's no harm in reflecting on that heart-of-darkness chapter of the 1981 hunger strikes to see just how far we've come.
McKeown, who works with ex-prisoners and in outreach programmes with unionists, Protestant clergy and loyalist activists, suggests that the next time Gen John de Chastelain hitches a lift with P. O'Neill, Paisley should tag along for the ride. And somewhere in the glorious bogs of Co Offaly, or the rolling drumlins of Co Monaghan, or the plains of Co Meath, the general, and P and the Doc, should wander into a deep bunker.
McKeown says Paisley should get his fingers "around the handgrip of an AK 47", feel it, witness it being decommissioned, perhaps even decommission it himself.
"And then he could personally tell his people that decommissioning was secured," he says. This would be Paisley's Doubting Thomas moment. Then there would be no need for those confounded photographs.
The British and Irish governments' blueprint allows for a Catholic and a Protestant cleric to witness decommissioning in the company of the general and the IRA. As Paisley is Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church, he is a cleric, so couldn't he be the Protestant witness? No, he couldn't. Paisley wouldn't play the witness role, according to DUP sources. McKeown has both a former IRA man's and a present-day academic's view of the impasse. There is no doubt, he says, that Paisley's demand for IRA humiliation caused huge anger in republican heartlands.
"Conflict resolution in this type of situation can't work if it is about victory or defeat," he says. He believes much of the groundwork for complete IRA disarmament is already in place, an idea that he and many republicans find mind-boggling.
"Look, they're talking about decommissioning, possibly by the end of the year!" he says. "The sheer logistics of that is so enormous that they must have gone some way down that road already."
McKeown is convinced that unionists and society in general are being offered a good deal by the IRA and, like Gerry Adams, believes they would be crazy to squander it over pictures.
So, is it really about pictures or, as McKeown says, is it about rubbing "republicans' noses in it"? Or was Paisley's sackcloth- and-ashes speech in Ballymena a ruse to ensure that there would be no deal ahead of the British general election, most likely in May, when the DUP hopes to rub David Trimble's nose in it?
This is where the plot thickens. In Friday's statement, the IRA said: "Ian Paisley demanded that our contribution be photographed, and reduced to an act of humiliation. This was never possible."
This allowed DUP people to argue that Dr Paisley's "humiliation" remarks were irrelevant, because didn't the IRA say there would be no Polaroids, ever? This is a moot point. As reported here in recent weeks, Dublin and London sources repeatedly stated that they believed there was a possibility of the IRA making some form of compromise on pictures, perhaps allowing publication, perhaps showing them to Paisley and other parties but banning publication, perhaps allowing Gen de Chastelain to take the photographs as long as they weren't published until the republican and loyalist decommissioning process was complete.
There was no republican bad faith, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said in Belfast's Waterfront Hall on Wednesday, notwithstanding that the requirement for photographs was included in the governments' proposals. But, equally, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, insisted that the governments believed there was a chance of visual verification of IRA decommissioning.
The general argument was that in the natural fraught dynamic of negotiations this would be the last matter to be determined - the down-to-the-wire issue, so to speak - and that it could be resolved to the satisfaction of republicans and the DUP.
BUT INSTINCTIVELY, FOR many observers, this seemed a potential deal-breaker. In the period before Paisley's Ballymena address, whenever The Irish Times put the question of pictures to Sinn Féin people the answer was always the same: "That's a matter between the general and the IRA."
The same question put to the DUP elicited an almost coy "wait and see". It certainly wasn't all negative.
But then Paisley took to the rostrum in Ballymena two weeks ago in front of grassroots supporters, and also in front of a BBC camera. "Humiliation" and "sackcloth and ashes" were what he demanded of republicans.
The clip wasn't broadcast until Monday and thereafter was picked up by other media. Questioned about his comment, Paisley was happy to repeat and repeat again his attack on republicans.
Why did Paisley do it? "Because the Doc is the Doc" was the initial reply from a London source. Then the conspiracy theories started. One unionist commentator suggested that the "Paisley dynasty" was reasserting itself. He may have a point.
The heavyweights around Paisley had successfully prevented him going into verbal-rocket mode since Leeds Castle in September. The DUP engine-room was acutely aware that words mattered, that symbolism was crucial, that if Paisley started talking as Trimble did in the past about "house-training" republicans then there would be huge difficulties.
It's important here to say that many people feel that a little sackcloth-and-ashes humility from republicans wouldn't go amiss. But equally it's a given, as Tony Blair acknowledged on Wednesday, that you don't seek to humiliate those you are supposedly trying to do business with.
On the Biblical side of things, one nationalist source muttered that "while Dr Paisley could see the mote in republicans' eyes he missed the beam in his own". Adams was generally restrained on the matter, although he did suggest that if in the 1960s Paisley had stuck to his pulpit rather than the streets, the Troubles might even have been avoided.
But it was impossible to keep the DUP leader grounded permanently. It is understood that people such as Peter Robinson, and other senior party members and officials, did not know what was in the Ballymena script. It is also alleged that Ian Paisley junior wrote the offending words.
On Wednesday evening in east Belfast, when Paisley was advising that if republicans couldn't tolerate sackcloth and ashes they should try a "hairshirt", I was sitting beside Paisley junior. Are you the culprit, I asked?
"Sometimes I help with his speeches, sometimes I don't. Sometimes he uses what I write, sometimes he doesn't," he said with rather a knowing smile, but refusing to give a straight answer.
So, is all lost? Hardly, although it would take major compromise both from the DUP and Sinn Féin to see this settled by Christmas. If there isn't a deal by January or early February then it probably will be the autumn at the earliest before the next big onslaught. Which, to insiders as much as to outsiders, seems crazy.
THERE WAS ONE little positive straw floating in the wind. It was interesting that, apart from Paisley, both the DUP and Sinn Féin have been relatively restrained in playing the blame game. A case in point was the DUP reaction to Mary Harney's insistence that the difficulty wasn't solely about photographs.
The Progressive Democrat leader suggested that the IRA had not signed up to paragraph 13 of the Hillsborough Joint Declaration of March last year to end activity such as "punishment" attacks, intimidation, and the exiling of people it didn't like.
The DUP could have made great capital with this, if it had been so inclined. Yet at the time of writing the response from a number of senior DUP sources was almost dismissive.
"What we have from the IRA at the moment is just holding stuff in the absence of a deal, as far as we are concerned. Do you think we are going to sign up to anything that doesn't involve an end to all IRA activity? We are not concerned," said a senior DUP source.
Over on the other side of the house the assurance was given from someone who should know, who said: "These things are not a problem."
In the meantime, people need a break. The officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs and their colleagues in the Department of the Taoiseach must have uttered a collective groan when Bertie Ahern, in the company of Tony Blair on Wednesday, suggested that the deadlock over pictures could be resolved by Christmas.
People may be tired reading about the peace process - and the longer it goes on the more one is inclined to sympathise with John Bruton's expletive-deleted description of the enterprise - but be very sure that the people at the heart of it, the party negotiators, the officials, Blair and Ahern, are exhausted with the whole business.
And there goes the Taoiseach urging Government officials to greater efforts to get this poor flogged beast past the finishing post.
"On an average day officials work 14 to 15 hours. Well, as for the big days, don't even talk," explains one Irish mandarin.
Yet Dermot Ahern and Britain's Northern Secretary, Paul Murphy, will be back at it again with the officials and the parties at Hillsborough Castle on Wednesday. A full day's session, we are told. Ahern and Blair will assess the salvage prospects in Brussels on Friday.
For the parties it is the same relentless grind; for journalists too. During one of the big days in the past fortnight, Gerry Adams flaked out on the floor of the library in the Irish Embassy in London in order to grab 40 winks. Peter Robinson looks pale with weariness. Yet Ian Paisley, only months ago thought to be about to step into the lift to the pearly gates, appears reinvigorated by all the activity.
Some wish he were less energised, quieter perhaps.