Beneath the sound of this week's dickering about what the IRA was or was not prepared to say, there was occasional lip-smacking, writes Fionnuala O Connor
"For once, it's republicans who look irreformable, not unionists," said a normally mild British official, pointing to irritation with Sinn Féin among leading Irish-Americans. "Reading these drafts, they're more impatient than us. They see IRA gobbledygook and they ask us 'why can't they just say it straight out?' "
Coddling the IRA has not come easy to many in the British and Irish governmental machines. To people who psyched themselves up before first meeting Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Gerry Kelly, much of the past six years has been faintly nauseating. Mary Harney's impatience last week struck chords, but it also exasperated diplomats and civil servants who at bottom agree that Sinn Féin's pretensions should have been clipped long ago. Fine for the Tánaiste to vent distaste: humbler toilers must control themselves.
Steam has been escaping, however, and with it a number of questionable assumptions. The first is arguably the most central: the belief until Wednesday April 2nd that the IRA would deliver "a historic and imaginative move." The description is reportedly that of Martin McGuinness to White House pointman Richard Haass in February, clearly intended as reassurance that republicans knew what was required of them.
But the specifics, it seems, were never revealed to any government officials - yet the two prime ministers ran on tram tracks towards the joint declaration planned for Thursday April 3rd as though the IRA end of the equation was signed and sealed.
Too late to turn the spin around, there was a whispered warning that it was not a done deal. When Mr Adams presented his first piece of paper, it took the Taoiseach and Mr Blair no time to see how far it was from being imaginative or historic, how empty of clarity and certainty.
So did republicans decide only at the last minute to withhold magnanimity and offer anticlimax? When they were presented as having spoiled the big moment, the immediate reaction certainly suggested lack of preparation. The media took stick: there was a degree of flailing around, never a pretty picture. In the aftermath, usually loquacious Sinn Féiners had to be coaxed into speech and they then offered a series of moans: we wanted guarantees, they said, on when control of policing would be devolved; repeal of the legislation allowing suspension of the assembly; a clear commitment from David Trimble that he wouldn't walk out again; abandonment of the plan to penalise Sinn Féin for IRA activity; we get none of these. These were not new points. Why would they collapse the deal only at the last minute?
In the absence of hard information, weary but still optimistic observers reckon republicans are saving their big move until the autumn, for reasons that make perfect republican sense: a probably well-founded conviction that voters will not penalise Sinn Féin for an IRA act of omission; and a belief that a weaker pro-agreement unionist leadership after an election would demand more in any case, so why yield ground now?
Irritated officials may well declare that republicans, rather than unionists, are now firmly identified as the problem.
This is not a line which will survive, any more than the notion revived by some insiders that a post-election SDLP will "at last" stipulate IRA disarmament and an end to all paramilitary activity as conditions for sharing power with Sinn Féin.
That seems based on a misreading of the SDLP' s likely future strength, and an equally mistaken presumption that wider nationalist opinion is as irked with the IRA as are Dublin, London and Washington.
The briefest of straw polls in several gatherings of nationalists this past week elicited a very different tone. Although these were much more likely to be SDLP-voting groups than Sinn Féin supporters, anger with republican non-delivery did not dominate. Views were well-rehearsed.
"No matter what the IRA said, unionists would want more. Whatever David Trimble settles for, he'll not sell it. Did you hear him saying the Provos fought for an ignoble purpose? It was their means that were ignoble, not their purpose. Isn't it a laugh unionists going on about democracy? As though they hadn't used force or the threat of it for the whole of their history."
The usual last line was the one that underpins most nationalist disinclination to accept unionist sermons on the need for all parties to cut paramilitary links: "They only disown loyalist murder when it suits them."
By hanging on to the leverage the IRA gives them, republicans may have further reduced unionist support for the Good Friday agreement, though few give that credence - but they are good judges of how little Northern nationalists believe in reconstructed unionism.