The Reverend Ian Paisley is on the campaign trail. Forget political progress in the North, if you haven't already. It is apocalypse now time for the DUP leader, again. "The European Election is now a life and death battle for Ulster's existence," boomed his press release on Friday. (In the flesh, the old voice doesn't boom any more.) "The result of this election will reverberate around the whole world. It can be the final death blow of Sinn Féin."
This is what Derek Mahon once described in a poem as the "lure of bleak afflatus", Paisley's return to the language which so deeply thrills the hard core basic unionists who adore him. They just don't get the same kick out of listening to him using this new fangled jargon – last week he was calling for Sinn Féin "acts of completion," for goodness sake. But life and death battles and final death blows are vintage Paisley, the Big Man as "God's man for the hour."
So was his warning that "Blair has decided that unionists are to be sacrificed on a Libyan altar of expediency" and that London and Dublin have decided "that pacifying IRA terrorists is more important than holding up the verdict of the electorate." Disaster is imminent - vote Paisley and save your soul! Vote Paisley and save your beloved Ulster!
Of course, Paisley isn't actually standing in the EU election. His replacement, the clever but rather dour barrister, Jim Allister, last week warned the electorate about the "Trotskyite tendency of Sinn Féin." They speak of little else in Cullybackey.
Yes, Paisley is out in the sticks again, raising the rabble. Allister, who was on the St Patrick's day US delegation, will be expected to win for himself the more sober, respectable votes which would have been lost had the Reverend Willie McCrea been let loose as the candidate. Allister is New DUP, very like old, but without the sectarian flamboyance.
The election is in June. Sinn Féin's Bairbre de Brun is fretting about the Irish language in Europe. The SDLP is almost silent. The UUP is too busy pulling itself apart and collapsing before our eyes to concern itself with elections. One party member said it was "demoralized, exhausted and riddled with backstabbing." Its South Belfast MP , David Burnside, now the leading David Trimble enemy, never stops advertising the fact that "we are a party in decline". Trimble said last week that the DUP had "stolen our clothes." Vote for us?
Sinn Féin, meanwhile, briefed reporters last week that as far as the two governments were concerned "what used to be "Save Dave" is now "appease Paisley." " Striking a considerably more downbeat tone than that adopted by chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness in the US last week, the party source accused the DUP of changing "its style but not its positions". The bottom line was that the DUP still wants rid of the Good Friday Agreement, the source said.
The meeting between the Sinn Féin leadership, taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the British prime minister was a stormy one. "Last October, we signed up to a deal with the governments and they found it acceptable," said a senior source. "Now the governments have adopted this bogus position that this is a two issue problem – paramilitarism and the willingness of unionists to maintain the institutions.
"We told them forcefully that they have responsibilities too. They committed themselves last October to acts of completion." He said there was "considerable anger" in the republican ranks. The deal that appeared done last October collapsed after Trimble refused at the last minute to endorse it.
However, Sinn Féin's argument is "just a distraction", according to an Irish government source, who described last week's encounter with party president, GerryAdams and McGuinness as a "full and frank discussion." The governments were steadily implementing all the "non conditional aspects" of the declaration, he said, though he admitted there were difficulties over the Human Rights Commission.
This body limps on uselessly under chief commissioner Professor Brice Dickson, though several respected commissioners have resigned. Dickson has been under pressure from nationalists and republicans to resign – he announced this weekend he is to step down, though not until next year.
"Sinn Féin say they did their bit in October," continued the government source. "But they didn't. They gave us a form of words but they didn't deliver. "They said the IRA would do nothing to undermine the peace process – the Tohill affair is there in neon lights, and they are still involved in activities contrary to paragraph 13 of the joint declaration. They haven't prepared their people for change. They are in denial."
The Independent Monitoring Commission is due to report next week on its review of the state of the ceasefires. It is expected to find that the IRA was involved in tbe abduction earlier this year of dissident republican, Bobby Tohill. The episode was dismissed by Adams as "a pub brawl". The IMC has been dismissed by Sinn Féin as "little more than a British tool" to bring about the exclusion of the party.
The Taoiseach continues to lavish praise on the DUP, now that its leader has stopped hurling missiles to welcome Irish delegations to Ulster. The government source that that by contrast with Sinn Féin, "the DUP seem forthcoming, they are engaging, they are trying." The fact that the DUP has yet even to issue its position on the North-South aspects of the Good Friday Agreement - "Dublin interference" as Paisley used to call it - doesn't seem to trouble Ahern. Nor is there any apparent concern as to whether the DUP has prepared its people for change. (It hasn't). There is much wishful thinking.
Blair gritted his teeth when he smiled for the cameras at Hillsborough before heading off to Libya ( to sacrifice Ulster on the altar of political expediency, remember). He and Ahern tried and failed to sound authoritative when they said the present situation couldn't be allowed to continue, and that they still intend to "fast track" efforts to get the North's political institutions back. Blair warned that a political vacuum would be filled by "dangerous forces." As if he didn't know, it already is.
