A mood of politeness and calm pervades the Assembly elections, slowly eclipsing the once savage contrasts, writes Kathy Sheridan
When you find yourself excitedly scribbling down the words of a whiskery accordion player lounging on a damp park bench, banging on about his "new" party ("The Mens' Party - hand-picked not henpecked"), alarm bells should jangle.
In Armagh's forlorn market place, a similarly demented photographer yelps, "Here's children!", causing Mark Durkan to twitch and the alarmed mother to back off, muttering fiercely, "Ye'll not get a picture of me an' the state of me hair . . ."
We should be in Limavady, says someone wistfully. There's news of a BBC man being run out of town by a crazed DUP supporter because his smart new suit makes him a ringer for David Trimble's elegant adviser, Steven King. "Away back to Belfast, ye'll get no votes here . . ." And we should have seen Sammy - Sammy being the DUP's Sammy Wilson, who labours under the illusion of being a latter-day Cary Grant. He turned up on Monday in mortar board and gown, complete with cane and blackboard, playing the role of headmaster at "St Anthony's Disintegrated School on the Hill".
Meanwhile, Trimble's campaign is tolerable because of the helicopter ("as if you'd need a helicopter to travel 80 miles", scoffs DUP man, Edwin Poots), the fact that three of his most prominent candidates are in permanent mutiny, and odd eruptions like "the fuss at the bus" and maddened loyalist women on the Shankill bellowing, "If I'd a gun, I'd shoot you meself".
It's not the SDLP's fault that nine out of 10 journalists prefer deranged people, silly stunts, street brawls and the whiff of cordite. Eminently reasonable politics, nice tea and buns in the party's nice house opposite an Armagh cathedral, and a ride in its nice, Kerry-registered minibus out to uncontroversial Keady, tend to pall beside a fast Sinn Féin spin out to deepest Crossmaglen, past poles adorned with enormous "I", "R" and "A" cut-outs and topped with tricolours; or a run on the DUP's £200,000 "battle bus" into Larne, say, where the profusion of bad UFF murals, flags and red hands makes it bloody clear just who calls the shots round these parts.
Drop into a DUP office and it's difficult to tear your eyes from the limited edition print celebrating Dr Paisley's European election victories with its eerily realistic imprint of a blood-soaked hand. "With God's help we did it - five in a row!", goes the legend.
In Crossmaglen's Sinn Féin office, the reception area is a showcase for items made by current or ex-Republican prisoners. A selection of leather wristbands bearing the names of dead IRA men or the slogan, "Tiocfaidh ár Lá"; some well-turned wooden bowls; bodhráns decorated with tributes to the Armagh football team or pictures of the "H-Block martyrs". Lest you wonder, four of the latter were sold just this week.
It's hardly the SDLP's fault that, having been weaned on the savagery of contrasts in Northern Ireland, the media is loath to move on. Durkan is energetic and personable. He has survived two-thirds of a day on half a mince pie, a Milky Way and a brief snooze on the bus. "But there are even SDLP people who think Gerry Adams is God," sighs a Durkan follower. Durkan has a mantra for lazy citizens: "The bad politicians are elected by good people who don't vote".
Ah, but it's much better fun watching Trimble's helicopter swooping into Paisley heartland.
Or Trimble, Paisley et al reverting to street brawling mode in "the fuss at the bus" outside Ulster Unionist HQ. Childish and pathetic you say? An embarrassment for Unionist supporters? Oh to be sure, but my, it brought this sleepy election to life. For a few hours anyway.
Mark Durkan trudging across a road bearing a lollipop sign saying "Stop the DUP"? Mmmh. A tad reminiscent of our future Justice minister shinning up a lamp-post at the last election. The difference is that McDowell looked thrilled with himself; Durkan looks mortified. It's not the SDLP way. On the upside, it gets media attention. Stunts work.
Whether they work with the punters is another matter. The general view is that apathy is rife and only about half the people intend to vote, according to a recent poll (which probably means even fewer on the day). But many, including the politicians, say it's not so much apathy as disillusionment and disgust - with the politicians. "Fuck the politics," barks a businessman to a canvasser near Newry, "just get the \ thing moving again."
This was refreshingly candid. You might think that Northern politics is alive with such engagements, but in fact, one to one, people tend to be unnervingly polite and non-committal. The only people who come out arms folded, ready to challenge, are elderly. The number of aggravated robberies from old people has soared in recent months. Otherwise, "No bother" is about the height of it.
This election, in essence, is about the SDLP versus Sinn Féin, and the Ulster Unionists versus the DUP. They tend to stick to their own areas. Even the hard-nosed Sinn Féiners of south Armagh look abashed at the notion of entering territory fluttering loyalist flags. And really, what's the point.
So nationalists tend to poster only the battlegrounds shared with SDLP rivals and the unionists do the same. The appearance of opposing posters can cause quite a flurry. When Sinn Féin posters suddenly appeared around unionist-dominated Dromore this week, the word, according to a tip-off to the DUP, was that they had been erected at 5 a.m. by 11 lads in balaclavas.
Canvassers rarely ask outright for a vote. "We're doin' a wee bit of canvassin'," they say sweetly, handing over the bumph. So the longed-for (at least by the media) doorstep confrontations are rare enough.
Andrew Hunter, the Conservative MP turned DUP candidate in the Lagan Valley, takes this to a new level. The Cambridge-educated, ex-army man is the Martin Mansergh of this campaign. "I'm the newcomer from England," he says slowly, presenting his leaflet to the householders on a council estate. "That's me, the fat one on the right," he adds, pointing at the photograph of himself and his running mate, the sleeker, 30-something, Edwin Poots. "Best wishes," he says then, with exquisite civility, leaving the punters looking a trifle stunned.
The candidates clearly don't expect to be challenged on their own territory - a Union Jack flies proud above us - but still, the lack of engagement is narcoleptic. Hunter is 60, with a gammy knee and, no doubt, a decent House of Commons pension. So what is he annoying himself for, trundling around a rather dilapidated little town on a wet Thursday, needing two full-time PSNI bodyguards and startling folk with his "Best wishes" ?
"I long to find an Agreement that everyone can live with," he says in the soft, reasoned tones of a man who has never enraged a nationalist in his life (although he has, assuredly, he has).
He fundamentally objects to the "appeasement" of the men with guns and the absence of "demonstrable" acts of completion and is convinced that the DUP is "the only vehicle on which one can base a positive renegotiation of the Agreement". Does he recognise that the DUP carries some, eh, baggage? Outside the ranks of the DUP, he agrees, the perception is "very negative . . . But we all have to change and the DUP has been changing and broadening a lot in the last five years and I want to help accelerate that".
Meanwhile, running mate Poots is racing ahead. His brand of humour is entertaining, providing your southern, Catholic sensibilities are not too finely tuned. He snorts at the notion of "good Northern potatoes" being called "Navan", reckons that all the citizens not at home have to be "good, hard-working Prods", and when it's suggested that his family of four children sounds more like an old-fashioned Catholic brood, he pauses, then chortles gleefully: "Ah yeah, you'll see more of that now. The Prods have caught on. The Catholics will never pass us out now!" A plot, clearly.
A slow-talking, grim-ish man stops to chat. "I was UUP up to two or three years ago but the DUP is the right party for the minute. For the minute. Aye. Too much given away to the other side. Aye." He's horrified at the notion of giving his name.
Poots has a loyalist pedigree. His ancestors arrived here, reputedly, as bodyguards of King William. His father was a member of the assembly that brought down Sunningdale - "though they brought it down in 11 months. It took us three-and-a-half years," he says cheerfully. And recently he's been down to Trinity College for a debate during which he compared the Belfast Agreement with the putrefying contents of a baby's nappy.
But for all the bluster and the Scotland the Brave ring-tone, he's smart enough to know that the old Southern bogeymen once employed to put the frighteners on Northern Protestants don't work anymore. "The big bogeyman used to be religion but the goalposts have been moved now for unionists. And another one was unemployment . . ." So what big sticks are left ? "Your taxes are high. Health, you have to pay for a lot of it. And why would we move from the fourth most powerful economy in the world to an emerging one?"
Meanwhile, over in south Armagh, where the road into Conor Murphy's stronghold of Camlough is dominated by a wooden sign declaring "Our fourth green field shall bloom once again . . .", the Sinn Féin candidate ponders the rather sudden emphasis on a united Ireland in this campaign. "I have reservations about putting a date on it. It's only an incentive to people to block that date. But I think it's inevitable," says the man tipped by many to succeed Seamus Mallon as the area's MP at Westminster.
His father may have been a fairly well-to-do chemist in Newry and not "nationalist-minded", but Murphy's path in life was dictated by the pub across the road from his SF office, where his mother - a McElhaw - was reared and which was burned out by the Black and Tans. An uncle was interned at the start of the Troubles although Murphy is not claiming that the family was not already "radicalised".
A graduate of Queen's and the University of Ulster, he served time in the early 1980s for possession of explosives. His brother - an electrician - did 16 years, getting out under the terms of the Belfast Agreement, complete with a law degree.
Murphy's wife, Catherine, was in Colombia, prepared to give alibi evidence on behalf of one of the so-called Colombia Three, Jim Monaghan, while the most prominent campaigner for thetrio, the personable Caitriona Ruane, is on her first election outing on the SF ticket in South Down.
With such impeccable credentials, Murphy has the tone and manner of a man going places, albeit with a touch of that Stepford Wife detachment, typified by prominent Sinn Féin types like Mitchel McLoughlin.
In the company of Martin Ferris, Murphy relaxes. Asked if Ferris was tempted to get a helicopter from Kerry, the two of them crack up amid memories of involuntary helicopter lifts - when, says Murphy, "they put a coat over your head and 40 boots up your ass".
Down at the farmers' mart, overlooked by what they call the British army "spy tower" on Camlough mountain, army helicopters clatter noisily over to Bessbrook. The talk is of cattle exports and continuing dawn raids on nationalists and doors being kicked in.
Murphy acknowledges that people are frustrated - "we're frustrated ourselves" - but denies that old Republicans are disillusioned and are leaching away, and keeps his spirits up by trusting no poll or census figures.
The canvass through the heartland, with hard-working SF councillor Colman Burns, is tame, raising a few queries about planning, roads and farming issues. No one mentions the war. Murphy makes a point of asking people if their photo ID (now being rigorously enforced for elections in the North) is in order.
For all but the darkest-minded, a dull, tame Northern Ireland, focused on bread-and-butter issues like roads, water rates, farming and health matters (just like the South) is a prospect to cherish.
The fading out of a string of big players - Mallon, Hume, Rodgers and an ageing Paisley; the slow eclipse of the savage contrasts - even Larne locals are voicing concerns about the effect of the flags and murals on potential tourists - and the fact that the politicians are being left to fight their own battles without dramatic, midnight calls from the President of the United States, all signal that Northern politics threaten to become humdrum. Left here long enough, you might begin to think of this as little more than a trumped-up council election. Which leaves the media with a problem.