Scanning the horizon of 2004, Northern Ireland's political weather forecast is frustrating rather than frightening. This, you say, is nothing more than comparative peace after miserable years, and you are right. We had a very bad time. However dark the skies, though, this is good by comparison.
In the election hullabaloo, progress slipped out of focus. Distance may distort the picture further. Southern superiority should surely be discouraged, though, by Dublin's half a dozen shootings last weekend and the thrum of gangland battle in the much smaller city of Limerick that, by the look of it, leaves gardaí and judiciary almost equally red-faced.
The North's election was indeed a shocker for some: Ian Paisley fee-fi-fo-ing and swashbuck- ling into Number One Party position; the comparatively sweet-natured David Trimble upstaged and deserted; frail rivals elbowed into the wings by villainous Shinners, weaponry still a-bristle beneath glittery panto gear.
Daunting enough, but not the full picture. The DUP leader is increasingly an unknown quantity: his party may be working on a new script. Mr Trimble's leading role, much vaunted, has always owed less to conviction than was comfortable for him or the other players. The SDLP collapse, though it surprised some veterans on the night, has been a long time coming. Nasty Shinner habits will take years to fade, but people who vote Sinn Féin in steadily increasing numbers are backing a party edging away from violence, not returning to it.
The peace process "entrenches sectarianism" because the political structures are governed by the demarcation of two major communities, critics say. Nonetheless, they have no crisis to bewail. This year's death toll from what was once uneasily termed Northern "political violence" came to 10. Lives were brutally stopped and families wrecked - but it was still the lowest tally for some years.
Of the 10, seven were the work of loyalists beyond absorption into any political activity. A gang beat a young Catholic to death in Lisburn. In six cases, loyalists killed each other.
The limitations of "the peace" were always clear, if not to those who profess to see it as IRA play-acting in exchange for favours to Sinn Féin. Realists knew there would still be brutal criminality, whether paramilitary or not, and there are many variations on the theme. Paramilitary ceasefires for Christmas always seemed in poor taste, but were welcome.
This Christmas, amid the now familiar horror of attacks on the old living alone, the seasonal twist was violence against Chinese and African people in the UDA-dominated Village district in south Belfast, scene of the most blatant racist hatred as monochrome Northern Ireland at last begins to change.
On December 20th a gang burst into a house, kicked and punched two pregnant women, then broke windows and threw bricks into two other nearby homes. All three families fled.
The Village is tough, suspicious of outsiders, home to unemployed and working-class Protestants in some of the cheapest housing in the city near the glitzy cafés and brazenly affluent shopping of the gentrified Lisburn Road.
It has been potentially explosive for some time. New arrivals to rent houses and flats have had a poor welcome. Some are Queen's University students, a considerable number student nurses, doctors and low-paid ancillary staff in the nearby City and Royal Victoria hospitals: people from various African countries; Filipinos, Malaysians; a few unwary students from the Republic, and Catholics from the rural North.
There have been beatings on the street, in houses and in a pub trying to reinvent itself as a "mixed" gathering-place. Condemnation from unionist politicians is almost inaudible. Spokes- people for loyalist groups claim there is no official paramilitary involvement. Observers who watched the UDA trying to keep the war going for almost two years by steadily pipe- bombing Catholic targets are sure this is another twitch of old murderousness, almost reflexive; racism as diversion.
But there are light moments ahead. One was signalled on the day of the count by a young former Trimbleite, labouring now with several other Ulster Unionist defectors in the 21st century DUP's boiler-room. As the votes piled up, his schoolboyish spectacles gleamed at the demotion of his former party, once Northern Ireland's unquestioned party of government. "Now I can say what I like at last," he chuckled to the journalist audience. He has said nothing since, that anyone outside the party can hear.
The silent circle round the leader-for-life may be history, but modern headquarters produces statements of remarkable unanimity. A DUP- model Jeffrey Donaldson is a strange concept. Mr Donaldson's final complaint was that Mr Trimble's attempt to cast out rebels, however belated, was the behaviour of someone who failed to appreciate Ulster Unionism's broad church.
Few churches are narrower than the DUP.