Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Have republicans sharpened up for latest talks with DUP?

Stormont talks resumed last week, but nationalists will be hoping that the Sinn Féin team is better prepared to deal with the DUP than last time
Stormont talks resumed last week, but nationalists will be hoping that the Sinn Féin team is better prepared to deal with the DUP than last time Stormont talks resumed last week, but nationalists will be hoping that the Sinn Féin team is better prepared to deal with the DUP than last time

UNIONISM'S dread of being called out for moderation is powerful as ever - although almost matched by fear that today's republicans are not up to manoeuvring around a DUP with a British government in their corner.

That government is desperately weak, however. There may be surprises ahead.

English politics continue down the plughole, a lesson you might think to anyone disposed to burble that people here are brainwashed by tribal division.

Could the Faragist hordes be any more tribal? At least our squeezed politics has never thrown up such an ego, has it, anybody so willing to feed the worst and most disabling fears...

The long dark legacy of Ian Paisley persists. It has been instructive though dispiriting to hear what the DUP tell their supporters.

A single question on air to Sir Jeffrey Donaldson about the party's support for a lesbian councillor - might it indicate new flexibility? - brought the reflexive response that the party's position is unchanged.

With a follow-up jibe, putting the issue of same-sex marriage firmly aside, that in reality it's the IRA Army Council that walks into talks. Why remind your supporters of the past if you intend to bring them forward?

John O'Dowd's reply to Donaldson's slithery fluency did the best that anyone could.

"I'm going to completely disregard that," he said. Sinn Féin clearly want to sound accommodating, magnanimous.

O'Dowd had just taken Jeff's low blow on top of a scolding from former head of the Human Rights Commission, now retired law professor Brice Dickson.

Dickson, cited by The View's Mark Carruthers, wrote last week in the News Letter that 'government' was a much more basic right than same-sex marriage or an Irish language act.

All his "friends and acquaintances who are gay and/or speak Irish resent those rights being used as bargaining chips in some larger political game".

It was an odd offering from an academic, polemic infused with personal testimony, delightedly re-purposed by Donaldson.

O'Dowd may have been expecting a different line of attack, coincidentally also explored since in the News Letter.

As the meticulous Sam McBride laid out on Saturday, anger about welfare cuts hit Sinn Féin and others on the doorsteps in the local government election on May 2.

If Stormont is still out of action on March 31 next year the mitigation of those cuts, achieved by a deal with the DUP, is out of time.

In addition, as McBride wrote, from then "welfare claimants are unlikely to receive any additional funds to make up for what they lost when Sinn Féin allowed the changes to go through".

So that's one motivation to deal. Maybe the scheduled working groups will also help.

Good luck on Irish and same-sex marriage to Paul Sweeney, now the person with the shortest straw, until retirement a couple of years back the most senior NI civil servant from a Catholic background.

Why are nationalists in general nervous? Because republicans are back in the room with a DUP who ratted on their last agreement; when the doors close, will sharp little DUP chisellers come at flat-footed Sinn Féin apparatchiks?

Anyone in the wider nationalist world who thinks this is not a great prospect must hope that the republican team has done its homework, and sharpened up.

Or they might transfer some faith, if not lasting loyalty beyond this working group effort, to Naomi Long. Sharp woman, took the worst unionism threw at her and profited by it.

Unless the Sinn Féin backroom has been steadily going to a brains gym, the wider world of nationalism might even find it has to put its hope in Colum Eastwood, who talks a superior match to his general decision-making.

Did the voters in truth provide a mandate to forgive the reneging, turn the other cheek?

Or perhaps Sinn Féin's equality mantra blotting out benefits and much else has indeed been annoying people for some time, as ventriloquised so curiously by a human rights professor.

Supposing, though, that an agreement of sorts is patched together and Stormont resurrected; what will the argument be when there are still patients on trolleys in corridors, schools withering for lack of teachers and running costs?

But oh, the dissimilarity in disposition of the two main parties. And so much for even the slightest pretence of British impartiality.

A policy meeting at Chequers with the beleaguered PM for Arlene and co; hints that soldiers will be protected against future prosecution, assurances that Westminster will not wave through what the DUP cannot face.

All this, while T May is merely a hologram. An odd time.