It seems hardly credible but Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, after meeting Prime Minister Tony Blair, is on record as saying that the increasingly rocky road back to devolution as Stormont will end with "the flowers that bloom in the spring" tra la.
Good news at last, or another false dawn?
Do they know something that has escaped us in the political turmoil of the sick counties of Never-neverland in this other winter of our discontent?
Devolution or home rule is going quietly ahead in Scotland; Wales seems content with a second-rate Stormont but after seven years wrangling about this and that the big house on the Castlereagh hills, Belfast, still beckons to those unfortunate assembly members – 108 of them – elected to the ghost assembly that never sat.
They have been living for years on reduced pay for the call that never comes.
Their predicament is unique and surely will merit inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records. So surprisingly is it to be hip-hip hooray on St Patrick's Day with the end in sight; the British army watch towers gone; the troops diverted elsewhere; the IRA and UDA demobbed; the money launderers deprived of their criminal assets; a new election announced hopefully – to attract a younger type of parliamentarian – imbued with modern ideas scorning the flag-waving futility of the past; looking to Europe and America for lucrative investment to match the neighbour's Celtic tiger?
All this sounds like a beautiful dream against the chaos of the political vacum produced by the last Northern Ireland election. This should go down in history as a 'non-election', for nearly half of the electorate deliberately boycotted the polls. For some reason this stark fact of life has gone unmarked. A new election may be too early to undo the damage and start the sectarian-packed sick man of Ulster hopefully on a new chapter of prosperity, yet sooner or later, when we awake from the present nightmare of confusion this is the way forward – the only way.
Time marches on and a change of heart is overdue if Northern Ireland is not to sink into oblivion in the eyes of the civilised world as a madhouse of ungovernable tribesmen.
After the world-wide exposure of the disgrace of the Shankill Orange riots and the Ardoyne loyalist attacks on Catholic schoolchildren together with the desecration of the graves of the dead – it was almost sickening to realise the extent to which the citizens of Belfast have been disgraced by loyalist thuggery.
On Wednesday night, late night viewers on Channel Five television were presented with a programme entitled MacIntyre's Toughest Towns. In it we were told "Donal MacIntyre explores Belfast, notorious for the 30-year violence between Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries".
For half an hour we were reminded of the appalling scenes of violence we are all trying to forget here in our native city, leaving us with feelings of shame and regret that our friends abroad will wonder how we tolerate such criminality in this day and age.
Meantime, behind all the mock fury and bally-hoo over peacemaker Fr Alec Reid's unfortunate reference to unionists as Nazis – for which he apologised later – is the pathetic refusal in DUP and Unionist circles to accept the IRA's historic act of decommissioning.
The opportunity to seize on Fr Alec Reid's remark to attack his "credibility" was seized on by all the usual suspects with avidity.
But Fr Reid, who played such a key role in bringing the violence to an end, quietly pointed out the undeniable fact that five people, the Canadian General and his two assistants, as well as the two clergymen, were also witnesses to the destruction of the IRA's arsenal.
For half a century the existence of IRA bogeymen was central to the Unionist-Orange bloc's grip on one-party rule. Without it their future looks bleak.
