Quiz games are all the rage these days and now they have even intruded into politics.
Quizmaster Tony Blair has put three questions to the IRA's Mr Big, the shadowy P O'Neill, their man in the iron mask.
Is he in heaven or in hell, that elusive Provo Pimpernel?
Nobody will say but we all await his printed work which usually appears in Dublin first go... in time to be rushed over to College Green to Brian Cowen at Foreign Affairs for elucidation.
Sice Blair put the questions demanding straight answers (Would yes, yes, yes, do?) we have not even had a cough... just a few splutters about Downing Street daring to breach Sinn Féin confidentiality especially that stunning double-negative which Downing Street found so ambiguous.
The actual words which the 'Yes-ministers' at no10 almost envied were: "Our strategies and disciplines will not be inconsistent with the Good Friday Agreement"?
Ouch.
Dev was once twitted by James Dillon TD about his dictionary republic.
Now we have dictionary republicans, supposedly abandoning revolution for devolution, playing ducks and drakes with the English language to the discomfort of The Head Lads in London, Dublin and Washington who thought they had it all neatly tied up.
The Stormont Assembly was to be closed down at midnight tomorrow (Sunday) and the MLAs paid their last pay cheque and shown the door.
The postponed election was fixed for May 29 when the iced-up assembly would be reopened for business. But all that has been thrown into confusion.
After five months in the freezer, the Stormont parliament is beginning to look like a Titanic iceberg, floating around as a danger to all normal peacetime shipping. Washington and Blair, God help their wit, even believed the Good Friday Agreement could be used as a model for a patched up Israel-Palestinian peace process.
They didn't know – but we all know over here – about that old bitch, the Ulster Banshee who appears at moments in history to cast her evil spell over our high hopes.
The enemies of the peace process in Ireland are already smacking their lips over the mounting difficulties which have bedevilled the efforts to establish the institutions of the new Ireland which beckoned on that historic moment when the world hailed the Good Friday Agreement five years ago.
With the dissolution of the first assembly to appear after the agreement only hours away, the hard fact must be faced that the politicians elected to that body failed, and failed miserably, to implement the agreement which won the confidence of the mass of the Irish people, north and south, in the history-making referendum which followed.
Some are more guilty than others.
We recall particularly the begruding efforts of the muddled unionist partisans, seizing every twist and turn to hold up the peace process from the early days, using all the old republican bogeys – beloved of the days of Glengall Street.
The doubting Thomases – Donaldson and Burnside – stealing Paisley's clothes, spread the miserable gospel of dissent until their so-called leader went into retreat.
If the IRA went a step further than Joe Cahill's vain boast that "we won the war" and admitted that 'the war is over' would Trimble
and his yes-no men and their orange-hued grass roots – so avid, as alleged, for the "crunch" decision – emerge from their trenches and come across the no-man-land in time for a great Christmas get-together, the new beginning all people of goodwill so earnestly desire?
That would indeed be a miracle... but who knows?
We live in hope for better times.
Meantime, while devolution here remains stalled, general elections for the new assemblies in Scotland and Wales are due inside a week.
The Scots and Welsh experiments in home rule have been so successful that their politicians fear the turnout will be low because local issues have become so humdrum!
Why are the Scots and Welsh so normal?
Answer: Because they look to the future and forget about the past.
