They kept their counsel firmly over months, refused to explain where talks had got to, dismissed all speculation.
Now the parties have stopped the pretence of talks, how much weight, if any, should we put on remarks from spokespeople for the DUP and Sinn Féin? What they say now must surely be a clue to what they have said behind closed doors. And how they say it now, surely, might even suggest what will happen next. Well, it neither sounds nor looks good. It is also no surprise.
The DUP want us to remember that they never accepted the Good Friday Agreement and that it was Tony Blair, not them, who made promises at St Andrew’s about Irish. Sinn Féin want us to know they merely want the agreements of Good Friday 1998 and at St Andrew’s implemented.
In making these points last Thursday night (on BBCNI’s The View) neither Gregory Campbell and John O’Dowd employed their sarkiest tones. Pressed to say what the parties were ready to compromise on, neither flared up. Civility to enable yet another last try or a contest to look the least blameworthy?
Campbell insisted that the DUP was ready to go back to Stormont in the morning - ‘No red lines, no preconditions’ - but also no movement. The Irish language? It had always got ‘better treatment than all other minority languages.’ O’Dowd said yes there had been progress though he wouldn’t specify any. But as for concessions now to the DUP, ‘why would you compromise on a compromise?’ He also insisted the two governments had roles to play.
If this suggests a lingering hope of British government pressure on the DUP to accept an Irish language act and perhaps okay funding for historic inquests, then Sinn Féin has truly lost the plot. If these remarks together amount to an accurate reflection of DUP and SF positions, then Stormont has had it.
Input of any considered kind from the current British government, beset by Westminster’s sex scandals layered over Tory infighting, would be a marvel to behold. Simon Coveney said last week that the Irish government had a part to play as guarantor of the GFA and there must be an Irish dimension to direct rule. What if anything those statements mean is a mystery.
Sinn Féin have known all along, like the rest of us, that the DUP opposed the GFA throughout the negotiations that produced it.
But the Adams-McGuinness organisation was entitled to believe that the party under Ian Paisley had accepted the gist of the GFA at St Andrew’s.
The Paisley buy-in was certainly flagged up enough. Adams and McGuinness needed a unionist partner, Peter Robinson needed Paisley’s charisma to carry the deal, Blair and Bertie Ahern competed to fawn on the vain old DUP founder.
What happened later was something else again. After the May 2007 table-choreography and even alongside the synchronised chuckles, day to day in Stormont it became clear that the DUP felt not the least need to pretend, indeed the reverse, that they accepted power-sharing meant sharing equally. Party activists and grassroots expected unchanged old-style triumphalism, and got it. That prophecy of a battle a day? It turned out to be more a marathon of humiliation – accompanied by bad practice of different kinds at various levels, tarnishing both main parties.
This is a bad moment for Sinn Féin, however they reconfigure their strategy. It is cold consolation that they face no real electoral contest, a situation that does nothing to dull the instinct to scobe and scrab at the SDLP whose scobing reflex is just as keen.
It only adds to the bleakness that the DUP’s supremacism is built on delusion and denial. Unionist voters rallied to the DUP as the SF vote rose. But unionists have lost their majority in Stormont. The DUP strategy for dealing with that is historic, traditional; circle the wagons, hold on tight. Where is the sanction on them to behave differently to come from? Theirs is a politics that cannot even conceive how to soften their long term fate, much less show spontaneous magnanimity. Behave generously now so they may reap generosity? It doesn’t compute.
The DUP supported Brexit though it menaces their farming and business supporters. They might as well be tied to Theresa May as her ship springs leaks, mutineers clubbing each other to take over the bridge. Deckchairs on the Titanic time; but apart from a single Sir Jeffrey squeak the DUP still sound smug. Sinn Féin are just trying not to look like mugs.
