The excesses of today's Irish dancing world are not easy on the eye. Lines of little girls wearing crinkled wigs and make-up faced a DUP councillor in the Europa hotel, a sight to panic anyone. What Ruth Patterson thought, as she looked at children primped and powdered like shrunken pantomime dames, is hard to imagine. What she said was "Fáilte go dtí Oireachtas Rinnce na Cruinne,"writes Fionnuala O Connor
In local terms, this, and the way it was handled by her party, was big news. A member of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party spoke in Irish in public in an official capacity, said she had an excellent evening at last weekend's World Irish Dancing Championship, and the sky did not fall.
On another Good Friday, with no prospect of renewed power-sharing and the darkest of questions hanging still over the extent of collusion between the official security forces and loyalist paramilitarism, it is tempting to despair that place and people can ever pull together. But there are straws to clutch at in a wind of change: often more breeze than wind and very modest change, yet remarkable in politics stagnant until very recently.
Ruth Patterson was in the Europa as High Sheriff of Belfast Council, filling in for the SDLP Lord Mayor Martin Morgan. The few words in Irish, she insisted, were "no big deal ... It's called having respect for another person's culture just as my own Orange culture should be respected."
Party colleague Sammy Wilson, famously abusive about what he once called "a leprechaun language, a dead language promoted by terrrorists and Sinn Féin" said swiftly that the greeting to the little dancers was fine by him. His opposition had been to subsidising and teaching Irish but he had "no difficulty with people speaking it". The Europa event was important for Belfast: he had greeted French visitors in French.
The DUP's road to Damascus is less direct than the original, but on a day when another DUP councillor was convicted of harassment for publicly taunting a gay fellow-member of a policing committee, the newly mild Sammy shone all the more. His old role as one of the party's crudest purveyors of abuse, of course, fits him particularly well for the new one.
It is a familiar process, reminiscent of the early days of republicanism's shift towards politics when Martin McGuinness trotted out new lines to the faithful, armoured against cries of "sell-out" by his record of ruthless militarism in the IRA.
For Paisleyites, as for many unionists, the rule has always been vocal disrespect for the world beyond Protestant unionism. Much as nationalism watched for "pro-British" statements inside the flock, the slightest deviation has always been pounced on. In DUP terms, Irish until now shared the same top shelf as Romanism, communism and extra-marital sex. Mind you, it says something about Irishness, as well as about unionism, that greeting little girls in mascara and wigs is seen as respect towards another culture.
The other straws in the wind, grasped and rejected alike, have had a more old-fashioned look.
Old but still live resentment at the largely unionist/Protestant names for the North's amenities refocused round the new bridge across the Bann to bypass Toome (or Toomebridge).
Call it Hume Bridge, said the SDLP. Local Sinn Féin councillor Martin Meehan, who made his name as an IRA man, said it must be named in Irish for Roddy McCorley, Presbyterian United Irishman betrayed by a Catholic neighbour and in the words of the song, hung "on the bridge of Toome". There was an unintentionally comic moment when Meehan told the world, in laying claim to the new structure, that Roddy "was hanged from this bridge in 1798".
The direct rule administration safely, if unimaginatively, chose "Toome Bridge". Martin Meehan says it will be renamed on Easter Tuesday, disdain for today's sensitivities disguised as homage to that brief, much-mythologised union of Catholic and Dissenter.
The biggest recent shift is on that touchiest of totems, flags. The first batch of prosecutions of loyalists arrested for putting up paramilitary flags in Holywood, Co Down, brought convictions, the appearance of more flags, and a police move to take these down as well.
When loyalist graffiti appeared on Holywood's GAA club, local DUP assemblyman Robin Newton was as forthright as he had been about the arrests and convictions.
His colleague Peter Weir, formerly Ulster Unionist and bitter critic of the Good Friday agreement's insistence on equal respect for British and Irish political identities, spoke out a little later. It was clear that people in Holywood were glad about the prosecutions, and the politicians knew it: an example of how legal sanction and political leadership can reinforce each other, and give voice to changes too often hidden in timid hearts and minds.