Sadly, they just won't buy a deal from this man

It has been a harsh few weeks for the deal- makers in Belfast. The visit of the two prime ministers Mr Blair and Mr Ahern in late June served only to intensify the sense of demoralisation around Stormont. In the immediate aftermath one senior figure wryly likened service on the Assembly’s preparation for government committee as akin to having his human rights violated.

Policing remained, according to one senior official, ‘the elephant in the room’: the problem which is attended by much rhetoric but little real hope of a benign but speedy resolution. Senior official sources continued to suggest that republican and loyalist involvement in crime remained significant.

There is little doubt — though it is not absolutely certain — that the government will keep its promise and close the assembly and end all emoluments to its members on 24 November 2006 if a deal is not reached. The financial penalty is a serious enough threat and the government — for all its crudity of tone — is right to employ it because it is one of the few levers of power available to it.

The most recent public opinion survey (Sunday Times, July 2006) asserts that two-thirds of the Northern Irish public oppose the British/Irish government policy of full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. It is confirmed again that there is no public claimant mood for devolution, on the terms likely to be available. The local political elites are far more enthusiastic about devolution than broad swathes of the public. So it makes sense — albeit limited sense for want of a more credible policy — to pressurise the local assembly parties.

But there is an unnoticed penalty clause for the governments in the November deadline. Closing the assembly makes less relevant the local unionist MLAs who are as a body (UUP and DUP) much more keen on a deal than the local unionist population.

In particular, the DUP assembly party loses its weight on determining the future policy of that party in favour of the parliamentary party and the party executive: the party executive is believed to have a traditionalist majority and it will at any rate be more affected by ideological than pecuniary concerns.

The ‘mother of all deals’, Ulster’s Hitler-Stalin pact based on the ‘extremes’ of Sinn Fein and the DUP, and therefore supposedly more durable, remains elusive. It remains a possibility; the significant modernising wing of the DUP is even more daring and ever desperate in tone as it tries to deliver a deal with Sinn Fein. But, so far, Dr Ian Paisley’s more cautious approach dominates party policy.

The prime minister has cause to reflect that those who pushed him towards the concept of the ‘Hitler-Stalin pact’ Ulster style — and senior officials in both governments and the US State Department opened the door on this strategy at least four years ago — may not have been doing him the best service. As ‘Hitler-Stalin pact’ optimists slowly slip away from their official positions and move onto pastures new, the prime minister is stuck with the legacy. He can comfort himself, at least, with the knowledge that he was the last to cherish illusions on this score, and only did so when he had no alternative.

The prime minister cannot, however, comfort himself by saying that he has done all he could to prevent the rise of the extremes. For long years after the Good Friday Agreement, and even after 9/11, the British government behaved as if it considered that the IRA had a realistic option of a ‘return to war’: in consequence Sinn Fein was able to give the impression that its moods dominated the political process — leading to the marginalisation first of the SDLP in 2001 and then the Ulster Unionists in 2003.

The question now is, as Gerry Adams flounders about trying to do a deal with the DUP, ‘might it not have been better — in everyone’s interests including Mr Adams — to have given a little tough love earlier in the process?’

The prime minister will be lucky now to see the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement on his watch — even in the bowdlerised form he put his hand to at the time of the failed ‘comprehensive agreement’ of 2004. The impassioned and frustrated DUP deal-makers will need to present any new agreement as something ‘new’, even, or especially, if it is in most respects similar to the Good Friday Agreement.

The biggest obstacle here is the prime minister himself: the very sight of Tony Blair commending a new deal will remind the electorate of 1998 and the old ‘discredited’ deal. It is a bitter and unfair irony — the prime minister has fought long and hard for the Good Friday Agreement but his persona is now one of the principal obstacles to its return. Mr Blair has achieved a great deal in Northern Ireland. He has drawn the teeth of one of Europe’s most formidable terrorist organisations — at considerable cost to the democratic leaders and liberal democratic values of the province. He has delivered prosperity.

He might be well advised now to devote his precious remaining time to bigger and more important issues. But if he is to display an interest in Northern Ireland he might reconsider his government’s willingness to fund paramilitary involvement in restorative justice schemes. Mark Durkan of the SDLP has said that he fears that Mr Blair’s plans would create ‘state paid paramilitary vigilantes’ freed from safeguards or accountability. Does Mr Blair really want this blot on his record in Ireland?