You never know where George W. Bush will pop up these days and the sight of men with telephone flexes attached to their ears prompted the notion that he might be dropping in on the Alliance Party conference to recruit delegates to his "war on terror".
It was a false alarm. The president was not about to arrive at the Dunadry Inn, near Templepatrick, Co Antrim. Rather than scanning every nook and cranny for moody loners with handguns, the security staff need only worry about the welfare of Northern Ireland's best-behaved political party. The biggest security problem was likely to be some delegate spilling coffee on his conference timetable.
Alliance is famously polite and civilised and, in military terms, would be quite useless in Bush's war on terror. The only weapon they have is tolerance and a spirit of "live and let live". This is a party with a ballot paper in one hand and a ballot paper in the other.
In the new atmosphere of non-violence and seeking progress by political means, you might expect Alliance to be prospering. But it has experienced mixed fortunes at the polls and just about held its six seats at Stormont in the last Assembly elections.
"I think we've bottomed out," says Alliance mayor of Larne John Matthews. "We haven't compromised our values at all. I would not foresee any big breakthrough but I do believe we are going to steadily build on our position."
Musician Patrick Smyth of Banbridge is just starting to get active in the party but points out that his Protestant mother and Catholic father originally met through their involvement with Alliance in the 1970s.
"Out of all the options in Northern Ireland, it is probably the best," he says.
Anger and the Alliance generally don't mix. Its stock-in-trade is soothing words, not Semtex or sectarianism. But there was a touch of anger and even passion in the conference debate on integrated education.
The ears of Northern Ireland education minister Angela Smith must have been burning as well-bred Alliance delegates heaped anathemas on her for failing to provide state funds for four integrated schools while dispensing largesse to their exclusively Catholic or Protestant counterparts.