The inevitable defeat of the UUP and SDLP in the Euro elections was a foregone conclusion. The only argument was the extent of it. It was gigantic, catastrophic, unprecedented and, in the case of the UUP, terminal.
The corpse will get another kick next year in the local government elections and any British general election to follow when the last of Trimble's undead will wander the streets leaderless and bewildered.
Straight away one great advantage of the UUP's awful performance is the absence of David Trimble from the airwaves. It's a tacit admission at last that he has nothing to say. He made a hash of implementing the Good Friday Agreement, undermined unionist confidence in the whole process and couldn't lead his party, so he's gone, never again to be first minister.
With any luck he'll be out of Upper Bann at the next British election. No-one will shed a tear.
Sadly, in the meantime he'll remain leader of the UUP because, as we saw last year, no-one else in the party wants to take over the clapped-out old banger he has left sitting at the roadside. Would you want to run a second-hand party David Trimble used to own?
Much more intriguing is the position of the SDLP. The party lost a mind-blowing 103,000 votes since the last Euro election in 1999.
Their share of the vote is down 12%. They're down on last November's assembly vote and on their share then too. Whatever comparison you make it's dire. Having yet another special conference to discuss what to do is not enough. They seem to have had one every year since 2001. Announcing another one only proves that no-one in the party has an idea what to do.
It's time for a fundamental examination of the purpose, role and nature of the SDLP.
The first priority is to decide what the party is for. It used to be to act as the Irish government in the north, to show the world that the majority of northern nationalists didn't support political violence and wanted to share administration of the north with their fellow citizens. None of that applies any more. The IRA campaign is over, Sinn Féin speaks for the majority of nationalists and the SDLP is no longer the Irish government in the north.
Any doubt that the SDLP's role as a surrogate for Irish government policy is over was laid to rest during the referendum campaign when Mark Durkan committed the political gaffe of his life by urging voters to vote No, thereby siding with SF and the Labour party against the beleaguered Fianna Fail/PD coalition. And he wasn't even contesting the election.
It was always a basic precept of John Hume never to meddle in southern politics. You are always going to offend someone likely to be in a future government.
So is the SDLP going into southern politics? Of course not. They are a strictly six-county party created in the specific circumstances of 1970. Perhaps that's the problem? Perhaps with the Good Friday Agreement and the permanent and ever-increasing role of the Irish government in the north, there's no longer a role in the nationalist community for a party like the SDLP, a party devised at a time when Dublin played no role at all in the north and hadn't done since 1921.
Gone are the days of the isolation of northern nationalists. That was one of John Hume's great achievements. Paradoxically his own party is not designed to take advantage of that changed position. That has fallen to Sinn Féin whose leading figures now campaign from Derry to Kerry.
Some in the SDLP have already seen the inherent weakness of the party's isolation from the Irish political scene and a couple of years ago were advocating a link-up with Fianna Fail. That won't happen now. What about the Irish Labour party? Pat Rabbitte comes to Belfast on June 29 to hold an inaugural meeting of a northern branch of his party. How does the SDLP relate to that? Isn't Rabbitte's Labour party a sister party in the Socialist International?
Should it be organising in the north to stand against a rival? Will Rabbitte's party run in next year's local government elections? Is joining the Labour party an escape route for the SDLP out of its self-imposed northern political prison?
All heretical thoughts to SDLP members but merely moving the deck-chairs on the Titanic won't stop the boat going down.
A party for northern nationalists needs to be on the national stage these days. The SDLP needs to get a drawing board out.
