Connect/Eddie Holt: 'Choreography' was the week's buzz word. Literally, it means to arrange or design a stage dance. As such, it emphasises externals - presentation, sequence, timing - that sort of thing.
In an age of showbiz politics, choreography is undeniably crucial but, full brainwashing aside, even strong propaganda can't quite choreograph psychology.
Yet again, we saw that the psychology of the North's conflict is about sovereignty of self-identity, not about lining up the conflicting parties in a Tiller Girls routine.
Whether you or I believe John de Chastelain's statement regarding IRA decommissioning was adequate or not, doesn't greatly matter. What count are the deep and conflicting feelings the issue raises among politically-involved republicans and unionists.
For David Trimble, there was insufficient transparency. For republicans, acceding to Trimble's "transparency" could mean only surrender and humiliation. Such stances are not merely rancorous ideas or political posturing. They are certainly not for choreographing because they are internalised at levels beyond the reach of mere structured presentation.
Time will presumably dilute these ancient passions. Indeed, it already has - but clearly not yet sufficiently for a deal to be finalised.
Feelings still run too deep for that. Since violence abated, the conflict has been relentlessly pared down to the primordial issue of parity of self-esteem. It was always the defining matter of contention anyway - the font from which violence and bigotry flowed.
From the civil rights marchers of the 1960s through the republican hunger strikers of 22 years ago, visceral emotion has always underlain political ideas. The antagonists have immutable core feelings and no amount of shouting or condemnation can change that. Most people in contemporary Ireland are fortunate enough to have personal histories and temperaments which have caused ancient ethnic passions to abate and lie so deeply dormant that Northern angers appear primitive, absurd, even embarrassing.
It wasn't always so, of course. For years, decades in fact, after this State's civil war, visceral passions simmered away even though they were largely channelled into the political parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Given that context, the priggish "a plague on both your houses" response from some people in the Republic to this week's debacle is pathetic and ignorant.
With Northern violence - the despicable slaughter at Omagh excepted - at a greatly-reduced level for the best part of a decade now, it's tempting to think that the North has gone away. It seldom receives the media coverage it once did, either here or internationally. Nonetheless, at the core level, rational argument is pretty well redundant where the North is concerned.
It's redundant because lecturing people about their feelings is notoriously counterproductive. Being benign, perhaps excessively so to both sides, the IRA, we must assume, genuinely feels it has done enough and almost certainly, more than enough; David Trimble and his supporters, we must equally assume, genuinely feel that republicans - especially the IRA - have not.
The alternative necessarily involves blaming either or both sides of playing petty politics with a potentially great prize. For all of us, the view we take on the matter cannot be entirely rational. It has to have an emotional component based on an instinct about morality - about fundamental rights and wrongs. As such, lecturing or hectoring the parties involved must involve a kind of wilful ignorance.
Still, ultimately, as Kim Philby, who knew a thing or two about both sides in the Cold War, declared: "You have to come down on one side or the other." For what it's worth - which is next to nothing - it seems to me that the IRA did enough on decommissioning. Then again, I have not had an innocent relative blown to pieces by an IRA (or a unionist) bomb.
Pragmatically, however, the awfulness of Trimble's stance is the succour it gives to Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). If they are the future, the North has further to go to an agreed, even if spiky settlement, than reasonable hopes might expect. For that reason alone, Trimble's rejection of John de Chastelain's assurance that the IRA had decommissioned its largest amount of weapons yet is regressive.
Furthermore, it leaves almost everybody else in the peace process exposed. Certainly, it left Tony Blair - the great political choreographer - looking foolish and it has left Gerry Adams practically naked. Indeed, it has also left Trimble himself exposed to the taunts of the DUP and Ian Paisley has already capitalised on that.
Anyway, in a week of extraordinary choreography at Glasgow Rangers' Ibrox Park for the Champions League visit of Manchester United, we can see that the practice is better suited to showbiz and football than to politics. It belongs to the entertainment industry and is best left there.
Politics, after all, has an internal dimension which must never be overlooked. Mind you, given the North's mess, it is minuscule compensation but at least the result in Glasgow provided something for some of us to cheer.