Five-party exploratory talks are supposed to start today but there is no sign this will be different to all the failed talks of the past year.
No new approach, agenda or chair is apparent.
Last week, an exasperated Sinn Féin accused the British government of having no Stormont plan.
This week, DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said nothing is happening and he cannot see devolution returning in the short term, although he remains confident it will be back eventually.
This mixture of hope and hopeless inaction arises from Stormont’s undeserved sense of inevitability - the belief it must be restored because there has never been agreement on another idea.
That might still be true in the long term but as the limbo between devolution and direct rule stretches from months into years, some interim measure must be found to make democratically accountable decisions.
Bradley acknowledged this in March when she asked all the Stormont parties for proposals on how decision making and scrutiny could be carried out on a “cross community basis” in the absence of an executive and an assembly.
“Let me be clear that this is no way affects my commitment to the Belfast Agreement nor my commitment to continue to work to remove the barriers to the restoration of devolution,” she added.
Most observers assumed this meant some form of shadow or consultative assembly - an option with its own sense of inevitability, having been used or suggested so often before.
This time, however, every party except the DUP and UUP immediately rejected it so the idea is dead in the water.
A consultative assembly is such a default Plan B that scuppering it seems to have left everyone stumped. There have been apparently serious suggestions to choose a consultative forum of citizens by lottery, modelled on the Republic’s Constitutional Convention, but this idea is so off the wall as a Stormont stand-in that it must be taken as a sign of desperation.
Far more legitimate alternatives are available, if parties were open to considering them.
The most obvious is a committee of Northern Ireland’s 18 MPs, to be consulted by NIO ministers, who of course are also MPs.
This would not have to be a formal Westminster committee, as that would present difficulties for Sinn Féin. It could convene in Belfast and have no standing beyond convention, although it would still have meaningful power, as the NIO would be politically constrained from doing anything substantial without its assent.
The real problem with a committee of MPs is that it would currently comprise only the DUP and Sinn Féin, plus independent unionist Lady Sylvia Hermon. Hence the Stormont deadlock would simply manifest itself at another level, while Sinn Féin and Lady Hermon would perceive themselves as sitting opposite a DUP-Tory coalition. The very problems that make this idea necessary have probably made it unworkable.
Perhaps the answer is to drop down an electoral level to local government. Cross party delegations from the 11 councils - say five councillors from each - would represent all parties and most views in fair proportion. There might be objections that Stormont and the councils have different remits but in desperate times this looks like splitting hairs. The same parties sit at Stormont and on the councils and consider similar policy areas, even if their powers do not overlap. As the NIO was prepared to listen to a 90-member shadow assembly it should not balk at hearing out 55 councillors. The quality of representatives at local and regional level is not significantly different.
There is one more electoral tier in Northern Ireland. We have three MEPs, all about to become redundant. Their existence recalls John Hume’s initial peace process proposal for a six-person executive commission comprising three elected members plus one nominee each from London, Dublin and Brussels.
Hume found no takers for what he envisaged as a permanent settlement but a small temporary group of nominees with various mandates is worth entertaining. Numerous make-ups are imaginable - all the Stormont party leaders plus all the NIO ministers, for example.
Suspicions that this might morph into a long-term arrangement, provide cover for de factor direct rule or require more than observer status for the Irish government could raise nationalist and unionist hackles alike.
But if this idea was also scuppered by rejection, at least the NIO would have tried - which is more than it appears to be doing at the moment.
newton@irishnews.com
