THE DUP coronation has featured a last-minute swapping of crowns, with Arlene Foster to be leader and Nigel Dodds her deputy.
This manoeuvre and its timing solve a number of internal problems for the DUP, entertainingly exemplified by running the coronation coach over Sammy Wilson.
However, the main problem it solves for Northern Ireland in general is that Nigel Dodds finds it very difficult to talk to Sinn Féin - an understandable issue for an IRA victim but a critical failing in the head of a power-sharing party.
Media performances suggest Foster finds it difficult to keep her temper while talking to Sinn Féin, but if Peter Robinson got over that, anyone can.
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The Fresh Start agreement's plan to cut the number of Stormont departments is being rammed through the assembly by Sinn Féin and the DUP using a procedure known as 'accelerated passage'.
It is surprising that this is going so unremarked when it is the biggest change at Stormont since devolution - far bigger than the St Andrews Agreement, for example, although of course the DUP wanted that to seem more significant than it was.
One of the changes it heralds is renaming the Office of the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) as the Executive Office, ending the 16-year journalistic nightmare of sentences like this one.
That in turn would assist renaming the first and deputy first ministers as the joint first ministers - a change Sinn Féin wants and unionists would be wise to accept.
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Why did it take OFMDFM eight years to produce an anti-racism strategy, running to a hardly voluminous 13,600 words?
One hint could be found in the final document, finally published this week, which concedes that Northern Ireland cannot run its own immigration policy - contrary to a draft leaked in June 2014, which proposed moving away from Westminster's 'one size fits all' approach.
If it took 18 months to realise one country must have one immigration system, getting the whole lot done inside eight years was actually rather impressive.
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Attention is turning to dealing with the past, the unfinished part of the Fresh Start agreement.
Sinn Féin says the sticking point is London's insistence on a national security exemption to full disclosure.
Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP's victims spokesman, says full disclosure would lead to an "unbalanced process" as the IRA kept no records.
In fact, there must have been some sort of IRA filing system as we know it gathered intelligence.
Whether an order to dump files followed the order to dump arms is an interesting question.
But Donaldson and Sinn Féin are both missing a salient point.
The state has extensive records on IRA activity as well as on its own - as shown recently by the on-the-runs letters, for instance.
So full state disclosure would expose British and republican crimes equally well, which is precisely why neither side wants it.
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OFMDFM is sitting on a report into exam performance and deprivation, presumably because the report advocates ending academic selection, but the BBC has seen a copy and its authors reportedly theorise that the stark difference between low-income Catholic and Protestant GCSE results is due to Catholic areas having stronger community links.
It is of course well known that the garrulous Catholic Irish are forever discussing their many children over ceilidhs agus craic down at the community centre, unlike Protestants, who spend their evenings alone reading the Bible while pruning a cactus.
However, a 2004 study specifically looking into this difference in so-called 'social capital', commissioned by the Department of Social Development under direct rule, found low-income Protestant and Catholic areas were indistinguishable and it was actually middle-class suburbs that had weak 'community infrastructure'.
Alas, DSD officials buried that report too, because the NIO wanted to find a difference that would justify bunging loyalists extra cash.
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Transport NI has ordered Belfast SDLP councillor Declan Boyle to take down anti-burglary posters he put up on lampposts on Ormeau Road, proving that Transport NI - part of the DUP-controlled Department for Regional Development - can take responsibility for flags on lampposts despite years of claiming otherwise.
This will be noted by residents for reference when the UDA next bedecks the neighbourhood, which just leaves the mystery of why someone complained to Transport NI about the anti-burglary posters.
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So farewell then to the Youth Council, a statutory quango to "encourage and assist youth services".
Sinn Féin education minister John O'Dowd, whose department sponsors the council, has completed a public consultation exercise on two options for its future, both of which involved closing it down. Subtle.
There are obvious concerns about an arm's-length grant awarding body having its functions seized by a politician.
However, O'Dowd will be handing those powers straight over to his department's new Education Authority, which can hopefully administer them more efficiently.
The Youth Council disbursed £4 million of grants a year and cost £1m to run - a 25 per cent administrative overhead just for giving away money.
newton@irishnews.com
