THOSE tweeted exchanges, in which Sinn Féin rehearsed serial show-off Jamie Bryson for his moment on a Stormont stage, transcripts printed in this paper, gave people yet another chance to groan: "You couldn’t make it up, only in this place."
Which is well off the mark, given that Boris Johnson has been ‘acting prime minister’ for over a week now, and the wacky malevolence Donald Trump has spouted in his remarkably steady trek towards the White House.
Not to mention the Republic’s current sports minister Shane Ross, another show-off, arriving unprepared but very talkative into an emerging Rio ticket scandal and tweeting, twice, congratulations with the wrong name for an Irish medal-winner while the state’s most senior Olympic official was arrested in his hotel dressing-gown.
But there is something more than a little peculiar, all the same, in two Sinn Fein men - or one pretending to be two? - suggesting how Bryson could best stitch into the record corruption allegations against Peter Robinson, the man then at least nominally sharing the lead Stormont post with Martin McGuinness.
We’ll sweep over the evident SF connivance in trying to finish off the DUP leader; shaken by a heart attack months earlier, his authority already bust within his own party, Bryson’s poisoned package of correspondence probably donated at least in part from DUP sources out to get Robinson for years. Internal treachery and dirty tricks by one party against another are the stuff of politics across the world.
An SF-assisted effort to smear ‘Robbo’ last autumn would have gone down well with the party’s grassroots, sulking at how republicans were being over-ruled and checkmated by the DUP.
So nothing odd there, nor in the tossed-off, casual reference to Naomi Long. What if, as she responded angrily, Bryson had seized on that to create a damaging rumour? Nothing Sinn Féin hasn’t done before, at unprovable, detection-proof distance.
Colluding with Bryson, though? Whatever else emerges of the dealings between him and Daithí McKay, (like how these began?) the image that will stick is of two eejits – or maybe three – careering on bikes downhill, heading for a main road waving their arms and shouting ‘Look, no hands!’
No attempt to steer Bryson could be safe for would-be steerers, which is the best support for the SF claim - after all was revealed - that this was a freelance job, dreamed up by McKay and his sidekick unbidden and unauthorised.
McKay’s swift resignation suggested he well knew he was deniable. The attempt to minimise damage, abetted by the flatness of official reaction from a DUP equally keen to close the story down, (except for the increasingly maverick Sammy Wilson), couldn’t stop Bryson announcing first that he had not been coached and second that SF party involvement had gone right to the top.
Jamie and Martin McGuinness, partners in skulduggery? In that respect the SF line had a fairly convincing ring. When McGuinness scoffed at the notion that he’d been in on the ploy, he sounded believable.
The other Martin, the one with the fadas in the still new ministerial job, had his own mention in the transcripts. In a bluster of bilingual tweets and well-cut jeans, Ó Muilleoir came back from holiday to face questions, resolutely upbeat and gladhanding.
His explanation of what he knew or didn't know could be eased a bit by the transparent brazenness of earlier finance minister Sammy Wilson, who provided the Belfast Telegraph with a front page claim that young, up-and-coming McKay had been ‘sacrificed’ to protect Ó Muilleoir as the current SF ‘star’.
Sammy’s dealing with Nama also crops up in the transcripts, thanks to an eventual mention by McKay after the oddest spatter of Bryson jibes at the DUP.
Is it reading too many thrillers that makes these sound like ‘wired’ informants? Badmouthing an individual or organisation extravagantly to provoke others into more extreme, hopefully self-incriminating responses?
Now Sammy is characteristically outraged, registering a complaint in the name of Stormont’s dignity and the committee system’s supposed role as a court.
But the DUP treated committee findings with contempt and the most memorable Wilson Stormont performances were his mocking laughter through committee hearings, his hectoring Jenny Palmer for refusing to vote as the party wanted as their nominee to the Housing Executive.
However, these tweets surfaced, career notice-box Bryson has probably enjoyed the outcome most. And if we learn nothing more?
Maybe unethical, gormless Sinn Féin is progress, from the days when mainstream republicanism was mostly clinical, and murderous.
