Despite spending half the year in deadlock, Sinn Féin and the DUP reached a compromise that just might work, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
POLITICALLY IN Northern Ireland, 2008 was a year of two halves. It was the year when Ian Paisley bowed out, and Peter Robinson stepped in, and Gerry Adams decided to spoil the succession party. It was the year the Chuckle Brothers' honeymoon well and truly ended and when harsh reality clouded over Northern Ireland's new dawn.
Every year has a special moment, and 2008's was by the green, grassy banks of the Boyne in May; and it's worthwhile to recall, just to make the point, that behind all the frustrating, often bitter, stop-start politics of Northern Ireland, that there were transcendent moments too.
Ian Paisley and Bertie Ahern, both then heads of government, had finished all the formalities around the new Boyne interpretive centre and the ceremony was winding up when Baroness Eileen Paisley decided to have her impromptu spake. She remembered returning by plane from her first visit to New York and how the pilot urged passengers to look out the window of the craft to learn why Ireland was called the Emerald Isle.
"I said to someone nearby, 'I wish I could swim for I could jump out and swim the rest of the way', because it was so green, and so precious and so lovely. And it is home," she said. She also spoke about grandparents and their grandchildren, and she and her husband have lots of them: "As you look at your grandchildren, and see them being brought up, I trust that God will bless you and that you will influence them for good. Tell them what has happened in Ireland, North and South. Tell them of the lovely day that we have come to."
It was a lovely moment: her generous, heartfelt words seemed to encapsulate the hope of the previous 12 months and in a sense seal the end of a terrible conflict.
At that stage we were a year into the power-sharing administration of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness who, while short on substance, made up for that in style, their good nature generally proving contagious.
They weren't getting much practical work done, mind, but the symbolism was important: the once bitterest of enemies working together sent a message to the general public.
But that was the first half of 2008. During that period, too, Ian Paisley Jr was forced to resign over unproven suggestions of cronyism with one of his business friends. The Da suffered collateral damage in the affair, and anyway there was a sense it was time for Dr Paisley to fade into the background - in so far as that is possible.
In June he handed over his first minister post and his leadership of the DUP to Peter Robinson. Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams initially threatened to block Robinson's inauguration. Robinson was crowned but the souring of his investiture was a portent of what was to come.
Sinn Féin dug in and started blocking meetings of the hard-won Northern Executive, remaining in the trenches until November, finally allowing ministers to meet in collective session - as governments are supposed to do - after a full five months. But during that extended period there was a real danger of Northern Ireland slipping backwards.
Some of the more atavistic DUP politicians were minded to launch fairly intemperate attacks on Adams and his colleagues. Adams said there were some DUP politicians who were "bigots" who didn't "want a Catholic about the place". Robinson responded in kind: Adams was a "sad spectacle" who should be "treated with pity rather than scorn".
Dublin and London wisely kept out of the fray, although maintaining a watching brief. The world economy was imploding and here were the DUP and Sinn Féin, after being given the ultimate prize of a government to run, bogged down and consumed with the usual squabbles. At one stage it was feared the brinkmanship would lead to the collapse of the Assembly, and for a month or so there was a real danger of that happening.
Robinson and Adams stepped back and found a compromise, one that seems more to the liking of the First Minister than the Sinn Féin leader. Sinn Féin had been demanding a timeframe for the devolution of policing and justice, and movement on issues such as the Irish language, education and the future use of the Maze prison site.
The deal that was done in November did not involve an explicit timeframe but a process whereby, with luck, there will be enough work done and enough unionist confidence to ensure the transfer of policing powers by winter 2009. It hardly seems that this resolution was worth the five-month blockade of the Executive by Sinn Féin but nonetheless Martin McGuinness appeared satisfied that the DUP will deliver on the key matters.
Sinn Féin's other justification for the impasse was that the DUP needed to know that this is a powersharing agreement where the two main parties are co-equals and that Robinson and his Assembly members must apply common courtesies when dealing with their Sinn Féin partners.
Not all DUP MLAs have got that message. If Robinson doesn't put manners on them there could be more relationship problems next year.
ELSEWHERE IN 2008, MEP Jim Allister made mischief for his former DUP colleagues, and will make more in 2009 in the run-up to the European elections in June; David Cameron and Sir Reg Empey, despite internal rumblings in the UUP, worked on a proposed Tory-Ulster Unionist alliance that, they say, would challenge sectarian politics; Lord Eames and Denis Bradley were writing the concluding parts of their definitive report, due out in January, that should be critical in dictating how the North will deal with its troubled past; Sir Hugh Orde, who must have a good chance of taking the top job in the London Metropolitan Police, warned that dissident republicans desperately want to kill some of his police officers and destabilise the political system; the Independent Monitoring Commission said the IRA army council effectively has gone away, you know; and loyalist paramilitaries still have their guns and are still mired in criminality.
There are lots of challenges for 2009. But it is clear that Northern Ireland doesn't grab the headlines for the wrong reasons the way it used to. The governments aren't prepared to indulge Northern politicians to the same extent as in previous years - a dash of cold reality sinking into the political mindset here is badly needed.
From here on in the DUP and Sinn Féin, and the other parties too, must get practical work done against a hostile economic environment.
The best that can be said about 2008 is that there was no serious regression to the bad days, that the politicians got there in the end - and look where we've come from. But it was all rather grudging; it lacked warmth and vision.
Thank goodness we still have Baroness Paisley's words to cling to as a template of how politics might work here.