It's official. The Shinners are having a hard time handling Peter Robinson's DUP. The speeches of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis made that clear.
"The transition has not been easy" said McGuinness, looking back with nostalgia to the Chuckle Brothers era when Ian Paisley "and I had the ability to work together in civil and progressive ways".
In fact, the friendly relations with Paisley Senior were based on deference. McGuinness grinned and bore it while the Doc referred to him as "the Deputy" and refused to shake hands with him. Sinn Féin calculated that Paisley might walk if they crossed him.
When Robinson took over, that calculation changed. Sinn Féin assumed the new leader would not want a collapse and the years in the political wilderness which it could involve. However, the DUP could also see, from Sinn Féin's supine attitude up to that point, that republicans didn't want the institutions to fail either.
With weapons decommissioned, a policy of abstentionism at Westminster and too few TDs to merit speaking rights in the Dáil, Sinn Féin needs Stormont, at whatever cost. As a result, the Robinson leadership has forced them to give ground on issue after issue.
At the conference Adams spoke of "a battle a day" with his unionist partners. It had not been easy working with them, he said.
Indeed not. Sinn Féin has lost most, if not all, of the daily battles, The point was rubbed home by Ian Paisley Junior last week when he said "I am not saying I would prefer to see Sinn Féin in government because they are a soft touch. I do believe that if the SDLP had more people there we certainly wouldn't be able to get away with some things we have been able to get away with."
The downside is that this trial of strength has often paralysed decision making. We had five months without an executive meeting as the two big parties felt each others' bumps and the economy fell off a cliff.
For about a year it has been clear that the financial programme drawn up by the DUP and endorsed by Sinn Féin has been overtaken by events. When it was launched in October 2007, I wrote that it could work but warned that it was a gamble.
It was the same wager the banks made, that rising property prices would continue to rise. Sales of public sector land and buildings would fund spending painlessly. Last week Victor Hewitt, of Economic Research Institute of Northern Ireland, played the role of the little boy who told the emperor he was wearing no clothes as he spelt out the facts of life. There is worse to come.
The executive had been counting on almost £1 billion a year from the sale of land and buildings and the market has collapsed. Two years ago, the Housing Executive was selling 2,000 houses per annum; this year, it is selling 50.
Workplace 2010, a project for selling civil service offices to speculators and leasing them back, was meant to produce £175 million. Just before Christmas, there was talk of a £900 million package which would be extracted from Westminster. Well, I hope we get it, but it's a long shot at best.
In fact, Whitehall is looking for efficiency sayings from civil service departments in the UK amounting to £5 billion a year. If the Barnett formula, by which we are funded, is applied, Northern Ireland will have to cut jobs and send the money back to the treasury.
So confident were our politicians when they put the public shirt on the property market that they removed their ability to raise revenue with a raft of crowd pleasing taxation giveaways. They froze both water charges and domestic rates, they capped rates for those with big houses and they cut prescription charges for everybody.
All this comes at a cost, which, in executive terms, is largely borne by big spending departments like Health, Employment and Learning and Social Development which are held by the UUP and SDLP. In human terms, the cost is borne by us all, and it needs to be shared fairly.
With problems like these, the point scoring between the DUP and Sinn Féin can look like a bit of a smokescreen, even if the DUP are winning.
