During an assembly election campaign which has been generally docile to date – despite the best efforts of Mark Durkan and Gerry Adams during a BBC television interview yesterday – one of the most striking factors has been the effective withdrawal from the fray of Ian Paisley.
The DUP leader has been a belligerent voice in unionist politics over the last 40 years, seldom missing an opportunity to stage a publicity stunt or engineer a media confrontation.
However, at a time when his party claims to be on the brink of an historic breakthrough, the profile of its founding father has never been lower.
Mr Paisley attended the launch of the DUP manifesto last week but refused to accept a single question from the floor while his party's most recent election broadcast managed to avoid even the briefest contribution from its most senior figure.
Opportunities to state the DUP case on Question Time, Hearts and Minds and Insight were all turned down by Mr Paisley over recent days, with party colleagues asked to deputise for him.
David Trimble's request for a public debate with his opposite number in the DUP, an opportunity which would have been eagerly exploited by Mr Paisley in the past, was also curtly declined.
The fixed grins on the faces of Nigel Dodds and Ian Paisley jnr when the issue was raised at a press conference betrayed the anxiety within the DUP over the role of their leader.
Suggestions that he would have more impact by embarking on a tour of constituencies, facing a handful of pensioners on a wet Wednesday in Larne rather than television audiences running into hundreds of thousands, were laughable.
This hardly reflected the track record of a politician who demanded and ultimately witnessed the departure of five Ulster Unionist leaders and no less than 13 Northern Ireland secretaries of state, albeit without advancing the unionist cause by a single centimetre along the way.
While some form of physical decline on the part of a man in his late 70s would be inevitable, the reluctance of DUP strategists to allow Mr Paisley to take centre stage may well be more closely connected with wider political considerations.
Mr Paisley's entire career has been based on a consistent dismissal of any proposal which involved reaching an accommodation with nationalists, most notably when he sided with loyalist paramilitary gangs to bring down a cross-party administration without any Sinn Féin representatives at Stormont in 1974.
Just a matter of months ago, he advocated the disbandment of Sinn Féin as a political party, only to quietly drop the subject when his call was embarrassingly ignored by other key DUP figures.
The reality is that, in an approach which is the antithesis of everything Mr Paisley stands for, the DUP over a period of years has already been heavily involved in power-sharing with nationalists at Stormont, at district council level and even within the policing board.
If the DUP emerges as the largest unionist grouping in the incoming Northern Ireland Assembly – a prospect which may well be avoided if nationalists have the vision to transfer their votes down the list of pro-agreement candidates – it is inevitable that it will eventually seek to revive a coalition with the Ulster Unionists, the SDLP and Sinn Féin within any new executive.
There would be a savage irony if Mr Paisley's brand of politics was finally relegated to the history books not by his perceived opponents within nationalism, or his actual targets in the Ulster Unionist Party, but by the emergence of a pragmatic element within the DUP itself.
