The Year in Review - the Peace Process: To the realists among policy planners, it is a question of 'when' not 'if' the DUP and Sinn Féin reach an accommodation, writes Frank Millar, London Editor.
Another year, and another deadlock in Northern Ireland. Or is it? Might Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams have already moved beyond us; identified the basis on which the DUP and Sinn Féin will inevitably share power?
And might they simply have parked the formal point of decision until some time after the British general election, in which their parties expect to destroy what remains of the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP?
That will be the lingering hope in Downing Street as Tony Blair sees the 1998 Belfast Agreement - one of the real landmark achievements of his first term - progress well into the third year of its fourth suspension.
Nor will the British Prime Minister's aides fail to find encouragement in the subtext of various DUP statements, even as Dr Paisley finds himself the winner in the latest phase of the "Blame Game". Indeed, nor on this occasion will they feel forced to rely on reassuring off-stage whispers from the so-called "modernising" tendency within the DUP's second-tier leadership.
The DUP leader won the Blame Game (or, at any rate, successfully avoided losing it) when the republicans rejected the British/Irish/American "compromise" proposal for a photographic record of future IRA decommissioning.
Under the plan revealed by Mr Blair, and the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in Belfast on December 8th, the photographs would be taken as IRA decommissioning was completed at the end of this month, and published as a new power-sharing executive went live next March.
Yet when Dr Paisley subsequently warned republicans against any thought of a side-deal - in which the IRA might decommission its weapons without the photographs - he contented himself by suggesting this would have serious consequences for the process.
Crucially - at least for those parsing and analysing his words in London and Dublin - Dr Paisley did not say this would be the end of the process. In subsequent clarification it emerged that the consequence rather would be that the DUP would require a longer "decontamination" period in which to have the Independent Monitoring Commission confirm the promised end of all republican paramilitary and criminal activity.
To the "realists" among the policy planners, and others now convinced, it is a question of "when" not "if" the DUP and Sinn Féin reach an accommodation that would be enough to be going on with.
True, Mr Blair might decide to put the British-Irish "deal" to a vote in a reconvened Stormont Assembly prior to its dissolution early in the new year.
Usually reliable sources indicate he is minded to do so. Yet, coming so late in a Blair strategy originally designed to force the issue by last summer - and, explicitly, to prevent either party "talking the talk" while refusing to "walk the walk" all the way to the election - the DUP and Sinn Féin will probably dismiss such action now as gesture politics.
The demands of Britain's upcoming presidency of both the G8 and the European Council notwithstanding, the "realists" in both parties will also calculate that Mr Blair will always find more time for peace-processing.
Moreover, the suggestion that Dr Paisley might eventually be got off the "picture" hook will further encourage those who have been convinced that the old firebrand is now looking to a kinder verdict than otherwise awaits him in the history books.
If this is fantasy politics, it should in fairness be observed that it is encouraged by some inside the DUP with good claim to know him well. Even some of Northern Ireland's most hard-nosed journalists feared that they had called the situation wrong earlier this month, convinced as they had become that Dr Paisley himself was tempted by the notion of ending his career as First Minister.
The "Big Man" has certainly had a remarkable year since the Assembly elections in November 2003 when his party finally eclipsed the UUP to become the voice of majority unionism. He knew well that rumours of his demise had been cheerfully encouraged and received, and by the end of the year had staged a gleeful recovery which showed his mental powers undimmed and his control over his party still undiminished.
There is, of course, an alternative view on offer, deeply resented within the Paisley camp and which some would think should be as insulting to those it is intended to flatter. This suggests that the DUP proved so adept in its management of the Blame Game because others had managed to keep Dr Paisley under a measure of control, with the outcome only cast in doubt when Dr Paisley shrugged off the rhetorical constraints in his famous Ballymena speech demanding that the IRA should don "sackcloth and ashes".
Government sources knowingly blamed Dr Paisley's son, Ian jnr, for this apparent débâcle, inadvertently pointing to more of the conflicting internal briefings which suggest the DUP is not quite the happy band of brothers it would have us believe.
Paisley jnr has emerged a more significant player in DUP politics than some of his colleagues would allow. Whatever the provenance of the Ballymena speech, the record also shows that Sinn Féin was complaining about attempts to "humiliate" republicans as early as October.
Moreover, senior Sinn Féin sources were dismissing demands for photographs before the Ballymena speech, which came two weeks after DUP sources claim they learned the IRA had firmly rejected the British Irish proposals.
Did Dr Paisley benefit from extraordinarily high-grade intelligence information? Or did he take a colossal gamble? And having survived to tell the tale to his relieved supporters - many of whom certainly wanted no deal, at least before the election - would he trust to luck a second time? It seemed prudent on December 8th to await the IRA's own response before forming a judgment about the performance of the Prime Minister and Taoiseach in Belfast.
In the ensuing hours it seemed reasonable to wonder if Dr Paisley had talked himself, or been talked, into a trap. For if the IRA had agreed the photographs, he could hardly then have refused to form a government with Sinn Féin. The prime ministerial terms, moreover, required him to agree the modalities for the future devolution of policing and justice powers - to be shared with Sinn Féin - by the end of February.
Yet the Tánaiste, Ms Harney, would subsequently invite serious questions as to why Mr Blair and Mr Ahern would will it so. For it transpired that republicans had been resisting Progressive Democrats demands since the Leeds Castle talks for firm undertakings to uphold individual human rights and to end the sustained IRA criminality the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, says has attended the Belfast Agreement. Since then "events" - the FARC judgment and the Belfast bank robbery - have intruded.
"Wouldn't we have looked right monkeys," offered a senior DUP source on Christmas Eve, "if we had agreed to form a government with these people, and then this happened?" He only had to pose the question to provide the answer which would have had David Trimble's Ulster Unionists laughing all the way to polling day.
Yet the bigger question - why has British-Irish policy come unstuck in the same republican pothole two years running? - may prove no easier to answer thereafter.