Fionnuala O Connor: It was supposed to be polling day in Northern Ireland yesterday. Election day came and went with no votes, an odd concept when announced, now just another singularity in the increasingly quirky story of the peace process.
This is not to deny the widespread anger, slow-burning but unmistakeable, that a policy of allowing the IRA to determine progress has been replaced by letting Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble arbitrate. Only the most deliberately unheeding could miss the conviction among all shades of nationalism that "David never had a notion of agreeing to whatever the IRA offered," as several of the best-informed and most moderate put it.
The view is voiced with equal force by lifelong republican supporters and SDLP party workers. An observer never known for sympathy with the Sinn Féin leader says "Gerry Adams made a wee boy of himself running back and forward, and he might as well not have bothered." Mr Trimble's identification with Tony Blair's and Bertie Ahern's shared demand that the IRA must comprehensively disarm - as well as giving a commitment to abandon specified activities - carried the media day. Before the week was out, however, nationalist objections were audible from more than the usual places, their message remarkably unanimous.
The fact that along the way Mr Adams became publicly identified as the IRA's mouthpiece was judged as damage to the usually composed republican. Yet barely a month later the view that "the Shinners got flustered" is replaced by a judgment that Mr Adams shed presidential gravitas to some purpose. He may have lost face, the nationalist verdict goes, but he visibly put in more effort than the increasingly complacent-sounding Mr Trimble. It is a view obviously echoed in the Republic, as the recent Irish Times poll signified.
No matter how republicans posture, however, the streets are not full of fury. In part, that is because the injured parliamentarian pose looks more than a bit ridiculous against a background of mob behaviour from Sinn Féin bit-players in Derry Council and at an Omagh policing meeting. More significantly, rather than any sense of crisis, what comes through is the vitality of the underlying process. In a political climate lacklustre as the weather, there is something more like recognition that at worst democracy has been deferred, not denied.
Whether or not this turns out to be any more than another bump in the road, trends will not change. "No matter how many political circles you go round in," says one tongue-in-cheek analyst, "you won't find anybody who doesn't believe that when we get an election Sinn Féin and the DUP will make further gains." The consensus is that postponement of the vote will not strengthen David Trimble's hold on Ulster Unionism, nor will the SDLP regain its lead over Sinn Féin. Ripples from the Stakeknife claims are still visible among the families of IRA members, present and former, and there is still no satisfactory explanation of the breakdown in negotiations. But the likelihood of electoral damage to Sinn Féin, whenever elections should occur, is small to vanishing.
Last Sunday's The House Will Divide, the remarkable RTÉ film on the process of painting all 108 members of the Northern Assembly, told a more vivid tale than acres of straight political commentary. The painting, a considerable artistic achievement, was the inspiration of political reporter Eamonn Mallie, art-lover, incomparable local interviewer, and the programme's presenter.
DUP members jibed at the prominent placing of republicans and of other unionists, Peter Robinson joking that he would like a painted wall between his party and Sinn Féiners. Painter Noel Murphy giggled anxiously as he assured Sammy Wilson, the DUP's master of bad taste, that he knew some MLAs needed to be "house-trained". Others wondered why Mr Robinson and colleagues merited their place in the foreground, fairly leaping off the canvas. Perhaps the interplay between nervous artist and demanding Paisleyites was explanation enough.
Seamus Mallon's grey face and greyer estimate of the absence of trust; Monica McWilliams's sharp focus on the vanity of Ian Paisley jnr: here was a portrait of a big unhappy family. But whatever their mutual distaste, the MLAs had visibly become accustomed to sharing Stormont and, as paint immortalises the first batch, others queue to join them. Mr Trimble's perpetual critic, Jeffrey Donaldson, is so opposed to the Assembly that he wants to be elected to it - the incoherence of anti-agreement unionism is yet another factor in dimming any sense of crisis.
A painted legislature may be poor substitute for the real thing, but the business of the portrait made a telling point: that nearly everybody in the political world sees the Assembly as the focal point for the business of politics.