A revamped Parades Commission was wheeled out on Wednesday and got less attention than it might have done in another week. Nor was there quite the interest there might have been in arrests - according to the Police Service of Northern Ireland - in connection with the 1972 bombing which killed nine in the little town of Claudy and the Northern Bank robbery, writes Fionnuala O Connor
Airwaves and television news were full instead of briefings about tomorrow's ceremonial, almost civic, funeral of George Best.
There is little point in bewailing the Princess Di syndrome. The service has been arranged in a hurry and it will be in the high-ceilinged hall at Stormont for the good reason that his family asked for it.
The Stormont location makes it a quasi-state occasion, and this has always been a contentious state. Nationalists once saw the physical structure of Stormont itself as the embodiment of domineering unionism. Only the most churlish would quarrel today.
Best was born in east Belfast. He was a star, and many want to witness his send-off. Choosing the largest formal backdrop in the city makes good sense, and the high white pile of Parliament Buildings dominates the east.
Whether the city can deliver in civic style is another question. For the bereaved family, caught in the media glare straight after a death-bed vigil, presumably what will count is that everything runs smoothly, with a decent quotient of dignity and the least concentration of crowd attention on them. Isn't that what anybody in mourning wants from a funeral?
For the moment, the cocoon of fatigue and grief should be insulation enough from the guff which began almost immediately about Best's legacy, how he transcended the Catholic/ Protestant divide. If this seeps back later, perhaps the family will be able to laugh it off.
Presumably they know, more than anybody else, how little their lost one thought about Northern Ireland's obsessions. He knew that he had fans everywhere and he probably knew well how little his origins as an east Belfast Protestant impinged on his legend.
Throughout his life, drunk or sober, little was recorded of what he had to say about his birthplace. As Eamonn McCann wrote unimprovably on this page last week, Best was "exiled too long, too far, too soon, to feel secured by a real rootedness". Intelligent person that he was, he behaved accordingly.
What he would have made of this Saturday's plan is hard to imagine. The history and the mechanics of the ceremony are odd enough. It took a piece of special legislation to permit the burial beside the parliament building of the state's first prime minister, James Craig, Lord Craigavon - and later Lady Craigavon in the same grave.
She had asked for the privilege for them both, having lived and breathed the setting up of Northern Ireland, and actually lived for years a few hundred yards down the slope from the parliament in the smaller Stormont Castle. (A grandchild of theirs was christened Janitha Stormont).
Craig died in wartime, so he missed the state funeral given to Edward Carson five years before, a Royal Navy destroyer having borne the coffin down Belfast Lough for burial in St Anne's cathedral.
Carson had lived to see his own statue raised in front of Stormont, a legislature which, as a Dublin-born Irish unionist, he regarded with bleak resignation - far from the triumphalism present-day nationalists, and some unionists, might believe.
But the massive building and the permanence it suggested for the new state mattered greatly to Craig. Official 1940s unionism gave him as much ceremony as wartime allowed. Large crowds watched the gun-carriage bearing his coffin pass by and the route to the side of Parliament Buildings was lined with special constables and men of the Royal Ulster Rifles. Earth from each of the six counties was cast into the grave before the crowd filed by. The funeral service was in the church he had attended nearby.
Best will go one better with a service in Stormont's Great Hall. The announcement that the soccer star's funeral procession would pass through Stormont's grassy acres came from Secretary of State Peter Hain just as some began to wonder if the local council of Castlereagh, headed by the DUP's ambitious deputy leader, Peter Robinson, was tempted to grab control of the occasion.
There followed an "Operational Note for Planning Purposes Only - George Best's Funeral" of decidedly hybrid origin. Sent to the media by the portentously named "Office of the First and Deputy First Minister", a partnership which does not of course exist, it was sub-titled: "Issued on behalf of the Best Family by Castlereagh Borough Council."
No matter. There is no longer any sting in Stormont. A procession of nationalist and republican ministers past Carson's statue and into that great hall shook off the old image and changed the place. Where else but the grandest of Belfast buildings to say goodbye to a genius.