All eyes on DUP's sales pitch

Intermission time: deal done, sales pitch to be made

Intermission time: deal done, sales pitch to be made. One of the biggest problems for the Good Friday agreement was that the leader of Ulster Unionism put his name to a construct which he had not sold to his party, and which he subsequently represented as different to the one nationalists agreed, writes Fionnuala O Connor

Today's DUP is a variation on the theme: leader who personifies intransigence now massaged, and aged, into comparative mellowness; footsoldiers beginning to realise where they are headed. Cue finger on Pause button.

If it's taken republicans 10 years to reduce their armaments by X per cent and their paramilitary activities by Y per cent, how long will it take the DUP to share power at council level? Daily experience makes a sour contrast with the positive old man on tour to Leeds and Dublin. "The DUP are lugging this huge baggage," is one official's mildly stated summary. Before Leeds, the biggest question supposedly was whether the IRA could and would go out of business convincingly enough for unionists as led by Ian Paisley. That was apparently answered, in the first sequence of Sinn Féin meeting the two prime ministers, and Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern in turn meeting the DUP leader.

Both governments are keen to present the Paisley team as newly co-operative, but whatever the IRA does, cross-community scepticism about DUP ability to change will be slow to fade. Unionists want decommissioning nailed down. Nationalists want equality and power-sharing nailed down. Republicans came in out of the cold under the mantle of John Hume's prestige, making allies who still disliked them but were convinced that they did indeed intend to end their violence. The DUP on the ground has made no allies. On the contrary. It has always gloried in the antagonism it generates, as evidence of its own purity.

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Northern nationalists, the SDLP most systematically, worry aloud that Ian Paisley, or Peter Robinson, will be allowed to dilute the essence of the agreement because the two governments are so pleased to have sucked them in. Others point out soothingly that structures will only work with cross-community support. But as that insider said: "Paisley's people won't talk to Sinn Féin, and the SDLP are very direct with them."

After all those years of jeers at Hume for "running down to Dublin", some are amused to see the DUP use the Dublin Government as "interlocutors" with nationalism. But the Anglo-Irish Agreement long ago began the process of relegating the days of snowballing taoiseachs.

It may be that Mr Robinson needs time to prepare his leader further to tackle their supporters. There is no audible rumble from the grassroots, but given how they reacted to Martin McGuinness in charge of education and Bairbre "Brown" in charge of health, the prospect of policing minister Gerry Kelly must produce visceral revulsion.

It could be, of course, that the DUP are chiefly marking time until they can squelch Ulster Unionism further in the next election. In which case, the only distraction will be watching the UUP and SDLP shape up as the new awkward squad, with a bolshy Mark Durkan unsurprisingly winning most comment.

For any observer who can sift history from revision, it would be a wrench to take David Trimble at his word as guardian of the agreement. "Was that what he was doing when he blocked the Shinners from going to North-South meetings against Mallon's wishes?" asks a tireless ringside scribbler. "Or when he told Mallon he was going to resign five minutes before he did it?"

By contrast, in the eyes of his party and many bystanders, the SDLP leader has every right to call himself the agreement's champion. There is a consensus among the least partisan onlookers that "Mark Durkan's played a blinder".

The past few years of shattered party morale and collapsing votes have been wretched for Mr Durkan. With his party now cheering him on, he can dismiss London sniping that he has been more trouble than Paisley and Adams combined, and mutters to the same effect from Dublin, as a compliment, richly deserved. On with the show.

Power-sharing between the Free Presbyterian moderator and the former IRA chief-of-staff is difficult to imagine. The stage is full of demons, bogeymen long in the making. In five years, or seven, though, how many will be gone: Paisley surely, perhaps also Adams and McGuinness? The three-year-old slogan on Sandy Row's Boyne Bridge is "Farc Off Gerry Kelly". Substitute south Armagh's Conor Murphy and it hasn't the same ring.

A frayed Mr Blair will have to be patient: he knows what it is to power-share with the enemy. The relationship between Labour's first and deputy first minister remains a grim sight. Productive, though.