Fed up and bored with the political stalemate? Well prepare yourself for another bore war of words. The European election campaign began up at Balmoral show this week with Paisley grinning and shaking the paws of the folk from the farms while the pigs in their pens grunted and the cows went on munching their hay. Another blooming election so soon after the crazy one which landed us in the ditch and closed down Stormont for God knows how long.
Will this one be different from that ghastly failure?
It's supposed to be about Europe but all the indications are that you, the poor voters, will hear very little about that great enterprise now involving 25 states stretching from the Atlantic to Poland.
It will end up enmeshed in the parish pump of dear old neverneverland with the Ayotullah still banging and guldering away.
He was supposed to retire but keeps cropping up to foist his wee cheer leaders – Robinson, Dodds, Donaldson, and a guy called Jim Allister – on the long suffering punters.
What did we do to deserve this?
Europe? Forget it... this is about the takeover from the fading yes-no Unionists – led, or misled by the disappearing Houdini, David Trimble.
The DUP old boy wants this new guy to top the poll.
Nothing to do with Strasbourg, the farmers, the fishermen, or the deprived citizens of the sick counties, who lost all those millions of aid in the locust years... all part of the plan to restore the good old bad days with a DUP First Minister, or Prime Minister at Stormont running the show. Did you get it? No Deputy Minister, No Seamus Mallon successor?
Sinn Féin to decommission at last? Oh no. Not even then.
Dodds says they must persuade us of their good intentions over a long period.
There's the catch. It may be for years or it may be forever.
A nightmare? Don't worry, it will never happen. Come October, the latest deadline envisaged by the embattled Tony Blair and nothing to show? The homeless Stormont MLAs wandering around like ghosts surely unique in the history of devolution!
It could only happen in Disneyland.
But what's this? Down in Dublin there's talk in top circles that there may be a British general election sooner than we think.
Good Lord! That would fill our cup to the brim and up-set the political applecart here, there and further afield.
The curse of the old Irish banshee who has dogged our history for so long – another election at the wrong time?
Remember the one when Ted Heath was overthrown by Wilson after he closed down Stormont and set up the Sunningdale Agreement. As he sailed away on holiday, he remarked concerning the mess in Northern Ireland: ''it's up to Labour to rule."
Well they didn't, they fell fowl on the job.
Top marks to the BBC for this week's marvellous documentary Shut Down recalling the inglorious episode 30 years ago when the 'Ulster Workers council' brought down the first power sharing government in the north's history by a gangster led upheaval, intimidating workers, organising power cuts, food shortages, blocking streets, and controlling petrol stations... with the added contribution of murders at home and mayhem with bombs in Dublin and Monaghan.
At first the so-called 'strike' was a flop but – when a petrified hapless Labour secretary of state Merlyn Rees failed to call out the army after two days – the 'head bangers' (Ken Bloomfield's description) took control and anarchy reigned until Faulkner resigned and the Tory inspired Executive was allowed to collapse by Wilson sneering about the Ulster 'spongers'.
The anti-Faulkner politicians who had secretly masterminded the putsch – Craig, West and Paisley – reappeared and pushed aside the UDA inspired ringleaders.
One of the politicians is still with us – the old trouble bird, Dr No.
In his book Northern Ireland: The Orange State, Michael Farrell says that three months later a British army officer, writing in the Monday club magazine, boasted that the Westminster government had actually decided on May 24 to use troops to end the stoppage but the army had refused.
He claimed that there was a confrontation between the army and the politicians.
"For the first time, the army decided that it was right and that it knew best and the politicians had better toe the line."
The Northern Ireland crisis had cracked the facade of liberal democracy in Britain and shown where the real power lay there as well."
