In far-off Australia a united team of sportsmen doing battle for Ireland in the Rugby world cup has excited the admiration of the world's sportswriters – losing a titanic struggle by one point against the might of the Aussies.
Surely that's a parable for our bungling politicians at home in the Land of No, still fumbling with the ball as we enter what looks like a last-chance election.
Five years have gone!
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps and the devolution peace process demanded by the huge majority of the united Irish people remains a dream shattered by irreconcilable bigots pining for the good old days of unionist one party rule.
It's never going to happen, but the bluster continues with endless mouthing of the old slogans and catch cries of a dead past.
Old man Paisley is out with the DUP's 'battle bus', well-named as he threatens to tour every constituency in the six counties!
He threatens also to down the embattled David Trimble and his yes-no Unionist Party entering this election held together with sticking plaster. No word yet of the DUP promise to produce an acceptable alternative to the Belfast Agreement. They prefer that term to the Good Friday Agreement.
The electors are fobbed off meantime with some DUP hocus pocus.
The Social Democratic and Labour Party, to give its almost forgotten title – the one main party without a murky past, chief promoter of the peace movement and the ending of the 30-year nightmare – is now challenged by Sinn Féin. There's ingratitude for you!
Who fears to speak now of John Hume's key role in bringing the Provos in from the cold of the killing fields, in the face of opprobium from friend and foe and the opposition of Dublin?
He risked all and won worldwide fame as a Nobel peace prize winner.
Sinn Féin has since been riding high but almost on the eve of the polls there appeared a cloud in the sky no bigger than a poor dead victim's hand – the finding at last of the dead body of Jean McConville, kidnapped from her crying children, callously murdered and thrown into an unmarked grave in Co Louth by an IRA gang. Almost at the same time Martin McGuinness, who was a success as education minister in Stormont's short-lived assembly, is hauled before the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.
He is hounded by counsel with what appear to be irrelevant questions about the IRA.
All a far stretch from the murderous killings by the guilty paratroopers.
Their crime has long since been confirmed by witness after witness but still this farcical inquiry goes on.
With polling day only a few weeks away and the whole future of devolution here up in the air, the labour ministers condemned to run the show in the absence of the reluctant natives must be groaning about their exile from Westminster and lamenting Christmas plans in ruins.
While they have been absent things are moving rapidly on the banks of the Thames.
The removal of the leader of the Tory opposition, Ian Duncan Smith, has been swift.
IDS was shown the door and, as he sped away in his car, a BBC commentator jeered that there was nothing left to stop him but traffic lights! Count Dracula, alias Michael Howard, was crowned as the new leader of the opposition and grinning nervously – for "uneasy lies the Tory Crown" – announced that he would lead from the centre.
The London media which has hijacked the role of opposition at Westminster shows signs of masterminding a new assassination attempt by turning the heat on the increasingly public ill will shown between Prime Minister Tony Blair and his next door 'neighbour from hell', the surly chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown.
For the unfortunate Norn Iron immersed in its local squabbles, the end result of this power struggle could be serious, for the anti-European chancellor has shown little if any interest, equalling that of Blair, in the future of Northern Ireland.
'Count Dracula' has also shown little interest, so we could be left out on a limb as the Brits tire of their overseas commitments.
P.S. Who is riding shotgun on that battlebus?
