The IRA says the war is over and the weapons are to be destroyed. Cue a unionist panic attack. Shouting "No surrender" when there's no-one at the city gates is simply foolish.
The siege mentality gave unionism meaning. What will Paisley do now he can no longer claim he's defending his people against their traditional enemy? If Ulster's darkest hour is over, what next?
Wait and see if the IRA's promises are for real, said that prophet of doom. For months or years. Weasel words should not be believed. Hole-in-the-corner decommissioning would prove nothing, said Peter Robinson. The party would "sit it out", said the pride of Lisburn, Edwin Poots. It was not "gagging for power". (Poots last week declared the law allowing gay people to celebrate love and commitment through civil ceremonies was immoral and "sticks in the throat". A new siege looms for Lisburn city. Sodomites in the Cherry Room? Never!)
The new Ulster Unionist Party leader, Reg Empey, revealed he is to follow in the footsteps of his failed predecessor, David Trimble, in trying to be more Paisleyite than Paisley.
The DUP had "fallen asleep at the wheel", he warned. Moves were afoot to bring about "an embryonic all-Ireland parliament." The UUP would obstruct the all-Ireland implementation bodies.
The UUP claims it supports the Good Friday Agreement. How to prove it? Block it. The SDLP rightly described this as "intolerable madness".
A loyalist spokesman said loyalists wouldn't accept the IRA's statement and that more dialogue was needed. Dialogue? Loyalists? Look what is happening in the streets. David Ervine, the one unionist leader who welcomed the IRA's statement and bravely said it could lead to peace, has admitted his party has no remaining influence on the paramilitary UVF, currently on another internecine killing spree.
The latest victim of that feud, Stephen Paul, was in the LVF, set up in 1997 to defend the Orange Order's right to march through catholic areas. No dialogue. Traditional methods would sort the matter out. Catholics were duly murdered. Paul (29), wore the gold chains with which loyalism rewards its soldiers. He was a drug dealer whose other criminal activities included seriously beating up his young wife.
The Orange Order also had the UDA's support at Drumcree. The UDA has repeatedly claimed it is cleaning up its act and returning to the traditional roots of loyalism. Self-styled brigadier and so-called community worker Jackie McDonald said this week his people were suspicious. Republicans must think they are within touching distance of a United Ireland. If so, he predicted a new era of violence: "Loyalism and unionism would rebel… we would become what the IRA were."
McDonald plays golf with President Mary McAleese's husband and the president was said to have embarrassed him by her recent claim that some protestants brought up their children to hate catholics (she apologised).
McDonald's warning should be taken seriously. The UVF evicted enemies from loyalist estates last week, humiliating the PSNI. The police were attacked by loyalist rioters over the weekend. Sammy Duddy of the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG) which purports to give political advice to the UDA, claimed republicans had hijacked the peace process, a campaign of ethnic cleansing was going on against Protestants, and that "the Protestant people are still alienated".
His last claim is true. Protestants are alienated. Many are prospering and enjoying the peace but unionist politicians and the loyal orders refuse to translate that into an explicit acknowledgement that the bad times are over, and it is time to settle down to dialogue and democracy. Instead, they encourage old fears. Catholics, and the British and Irish governments, are moving on. The watchtowers are coming down. The RIR is to be disbanded.
Paisley could be first minister any day he wants. And he wants.
But his hunger to make republicans wear sackcloth and ashes has not been appeased. He also wants to wipe out the UUP in assembly elections.
The farce that was the Sean Kelly affair – arrested at the behest of the DUP, released at the behest of Sinn Féin – shows the British are past pretending that normal politics or legal processes currently apply here in the land of dreary steeples.
The poet Derek Mahon wrote in 1972 of the lure of "bleak afflatus" and "fierce zeal", in a country where a one-eyed king can stand on the corner "stiff/with rhetoric, promising nothing under the sun". Unionists still love that country. It is a dangerous patriotism.
