When will this idiocy end? When we will learn that the divisions within Northern Ireland cannot be solved by some miraculous, all-inclusive remedy? Are we doomed to this Sisyphean attempt at inclusivism until at length the stars freeze over, the polar ice-caps embrace the tropical rain-forests, and the only warmth generated on this entire planet, the only noise to break the utter arctic silence of icefield and floe, emanate from the dull furies from within Ulster's drumlins?
Remember the old joke: every time the British found an answer to the Irish question, the Irish changed the question. Like a virus mutating within its host, Northern Ireland's conflict endlessly finds fresh expression. Its creative powers are almost those of high art, defying the predictions of the most educated soothsayers.
Garvaghy Road
Who had heard of Garvaghy Road six years ago? Who would have predicted that the Good Friday Agreement would fall to pieces in the middle of the quietest summer in Northern Ireland since 1968? Who might ever have predicted that the first lawful executive-elect of Northern Ireland in 25 years would consist - for about half-an-hour, anyway - of a power-sharing administration between Provisional Sinn Fein and the SDLP?
And, most spectularly of all, what hallucinogenic substance could have enabled anyone to have foreseen a sitting of Stormont last Thursday in which one man was declared to be both a member of the IRA Army Council and the province's new Minister for Agriculture, and another to be on the IRA Army Council and the new Minister for Education?
All the evidence is that a solution is not possible, that Northern Ireland may be administered, but it cannot be consensually governed; yet that intellectually obvious, evidentially confirmed truth is repeatedly ignored, not just down the years but down the decades, in favour of the John Hume dogma that an all-inclusive settlement is the only solution. Dogma it has surely become: Humeism is as much an article of faith for employment within the Department of Foreign Affairs as is belief in transubstantiation for employment within the Vatican Curia.
Of course there is, can be, no proof of transubstantiation, and no scientific confirmation of the possibilities of all-inclusivism. That the reverse might possibly be the case is of course irrelevant. Christians might dutifully go to the lions chanting hymns; doomed Stormont political experiment might follow doomed political experiment; but towering above all else, the enduring faith in the central dogma of either is diminished not one whit.
Kicking stones
It was another Hume whose philosophy was based on the impossibility of actually proving that matter exists. Its substance seemed too elusive, too etheral to rebut. "I refute it thus," snarled Dr Johnson, kicking a stone. Sceptics over the North have been kicking stones for decades now, but the neo-Humean piety that all-inclusivism is impossible to disprove remains as triumphant as ever. And when it fails, as it always has done, then one finds someone to blame; the unionists normally, with maybe a whiff of MI5 as well.
It is this simple. No all-inclusive quilt will cover both the scalp and the feet of Northern Ireland. The follicles hate the feet, the toenails the scalp. Was this not obvious on the very first day of the Assembly when Martin McGuinness jeered at Sammy Wilson that he didn't recognise him with his clothes on (a reference to a Sunday World theft of nudist photographs)? What path of reconciliation were we on when such a gratuitous insult was offered during reconciliation's opening breath?
To be sure, that was not why this latest experiment in inclusivism failed: but that such a formidable and persuasive (and indeed courageous) influence in the history of the peace process as Martin McGuinness was so swiftly tempted to deride the opposition tells us of far more than the naked Protestant and the jeering Catholic. It speaks aloud of profound and enduring tribal hatred which might possibly be stabilised, but cannot be reconciled.
Is the vaingloriously nationalist belief that a step-hold can be got into Northern Ireland's fabric, and thereby some solution found, so total that this simple truth cannot be seen? The quilt which warms unionism from its centre to its orange extremities leaves all of republicanism blue with cold and nationalism shivering. Similarly, what warms nationalism/republicanism cools unionism and gives Paisleyism frostbite.
Aspirations
We have heard much journolegalistic cant from recent converts to that trade about the details of the Good Friday Agreement. That agreement was assented to by the people of Ireland, but it remains aspirational, not contractual. I have said here that Sinn Fein's problems would go away if it split from the IRA. But on reflection, how useful is that kind of observation? Sinn Fein without the IRA would be no more than the SDLP after half-a-bottle of Paddy. Sinn Fein is defined by its armed guardians.
Three Sinn Fein members of the Assembly were accused of being members of the IRA Army Council on Thurday. Another, Pat Doherty, was accused to his face by Ken Maginnis on BBC television on Thursday night, that he was a member of the IRA Army Council. He did not deny it. Please, please tell me: what democratic government in this world could possibly be composed of such ingredients and survive?