This is surely an odd point in history for the unionist and loyalist community, its fragmentation never more obvious, writes Fionnuala O'Connor.
Low-level DUP resignations continue, with little or no impact. Up on the heights of political achievement their leader smiles at the same table as the demon figure of Martin McGuinness. Even in the new dispensation, however, nobody imagined a simple ending for paramilitary loyalism. The shifts only make it more obvious that loyalism has not kept up.
The UDA may have disintegrated into terminal disorder. Yesterday's contradictory announcement from the UVF - that they would keep their guns but put them beyond reach - had been more than a shade diminished in advance by recent evidence that targeting of Catholics continues. The best hope is that progress has its own momentum.
Of the long-lived Paisley injunctions to "touch not the unclean thing, come ye out and be separate", little is left but a refusal to shake hands.
Kidnapping and assault charges for a McGuinness brother-in-law produced not a shiver in the body politic. On Tuesday the First and Deputy First Ministers appeared for press and public with visiting European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, Peter Hain and, oh yes, that Minister from the foreign state across the Border, Dermot Ahern.
The simple bewildered who thought never meant never are washed up with leftover republicans on the shores of history.
Another Ballymena councillor says he will leave the DUP, the sixth to do so, if the party begins sharing power next Tuesday. William Wilkinson says he has concerns about Sinn Féin's commitment to policing and "continued criminality within the IRA". It must seem odd, though, at least to outsiders, that like his unhappy colleagues, Wilkinson is purely concerned about republicans. Of the 70 killings attributed to paramilitaries this century, no more than seven are blamed on the IRA, several of them hotly disputed. By contrast 56 people, mostly Protestant and many of them loyalist, have died at the hands of loyalists.
Pressed on their disparate attitudes to loyalists and republicans, unionist politicians say that the difference is obvious: the IRA has made its way into government. Some add, a little smugly, that Catholics have made Sinn Féin their leading party despite the violence of the IRA, while Protestants will not vote for loyalist paramilitary parties.
There is no room for smugness. Even when represented and allegedly "advised" - though the advisers often had red faces - by astute political spokesmen like the late David Ervine and David Adams, the UVF and UDA have never come close to disarming. Their ceasefires have been more breached than observed. The pretence that loyalist paramilitarism was created and sustained by republican violence failed some time ago.
The smart and personable Dawn Purvis came into loyalist politics with no paramilitary record and still managed to win more votes in east Belfast than David Ervine had. But when it emerged last month that the UVF had been amassing details on Catholics filched from police databases, Purvis sounded too swift and too glib in dismissing any possibility of a threat.
Ervine's premature death underlined the slightness of loyalist politics.
Below a thin top dressing of charisma, Progressive Unionism seems scarcely to exist. Fairly obviously for want of other articulate figures, yesterday's UVF move brought the aged Gusty Spence and Ervine's Progressive Unionist co-founder Billy Hutchinson fleetingly back into the spotlight.
In Rathcoole, in east Belfast and what's left of the Shankill and Sandy Row, it is clear that the UVF and the UDA never even tried to build anything remotely similar to the escape route from violence plotted by Gerry Adams and others. Now they have nowhere to go. The slow business of disentangling a purely political republicanism from its militarist origins exhausted well-wishers and gave critics many opportunities to cry foul.
Self-centredness - or perhaps simply arrogance at leadership level - meant IRA "punishment" shootings and beatings, robberies and other crime continued until the governments explicitly demanded an end to all activity. But even Ian Paisley no longer regards Sinn Féin as inextricably linked to the IRA.
For much of the time the pretence was that loyalists were committed to similar progress. For too many at the paramilitary sharp end, the preoccupation has clearly been that if they disband they lose the easy money that let a north Belfast UDA chief give something like £800,000 to the bookies. And the big argument against giving up the guns is not fear of republicans, but of other loyalists.
Districts destroyed by paramilitaries deserve representation free of the excuses and pretence that have characterised too much of loyalist politics.
Perhaps more time will do it. The role model is there. Sinn Féin had small beginnings too.