It isn't going to be a brand new dawn in Northern Ireland when they get the Assembly going, you know. The miracle is that it will be happening at all, not that there's anything miraculous about it in itself.
For one thing, it is going to be like the Dail was in the 1960s, before the Women's Political Association, with the help of Garret FitzGerald, broke the gender barrier. That's how male - how single-perspective - it is going to be.
They've got rid of the two marvellous women who represented the Women's Coalition at the Stormont peace talks. Pity. Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sagar noticed little things as well as big things. They noticed the walls decorated with women's breasts - the pin-ups - in the prison wardens' room when they went to Long Kesh to visit prisoners. They noticed, at the talks, how one male participant - a famous bully - nevertheless always looked for reassurance that his speeches were really brilliant from his pal. They noticed the love and respect with which Davy Adams of the UDP talks about his wife and children. They noticed that at 4.30 in the morning after days of non-stop work, flying along a corridor, what Mo Mowlam badly needed was a calming hug.
But they have no tribal standing. The Women's Coalition includes town and country women: middle- and working-class women; women of all religions and none. It attracts a few votes everywhere, but not enough votes to get elected in any one constituency. Not unless a "top-up" mechanism had been agreed in the procedure for election to the new Northern Ireland Assembly.
But the big boys wouldn't hear of it. The Ulster Unionists were afraid that topping-up would also get two or three other fringe candidates in. The SDLP backed their unionist counterparts. They didn't choose to make an issue of the fledgling women's party's hopes.
So it was, "Cheerio girls, and thanks for the laughs". Pearl and Monica went on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour recently and explained what had happened to them. The next day Tony Blair was on Woman's Hour. Someone had briefed him. "It would be both counterproductive and wrong," he said, "if we didn't find some way of involving those people."
But while elections and parties remain the entrenched things they are, not just in Northern Ireland but especially there, there is no way to include women, as women. The tones Pearl and Monica use so naturally - common sense, humour, sarcasm, simplicity - have no place in a political culture weighed down by ponderous self-importance, and made lively only by rancour.
The position, you understand, is different from what it was in the Republic when Garret FitzGerald made the first conscious effort to get women into the Dail. Then there were settled political structures in existence. In Northern Ireland, now, structures are only being arrived at. But the men who did the design obviously see nothing at all odd about peace talks where 110 men and seven women debated the future of Northern Ireland. Or about setting up an Assembly where the gender balance will be much the same. The big parties will obviously allow a few women forward, on the usual basis. The Women's Coalition, which is quite outside the usual bases, has no money at all and a scattered vote. How can it compete?
That won't stop Monica McWilliams trying to get elected. At the coalition's meeting the day before yesterday she indicated that she'd give it a go. Even though she despises what she has seen of what is called politics in Northern Ireland.
"The politics of conflict is easy," she says. "You just sit there being as bigoted and obstructive as you can be. But when peace comes people will begin asking more of their politicians . . ." She's dying to be part of the new dispensation. But, she adds: "The sectarian conflict here will be solved sooner than the patriarchal issue". And certainly, the statistics suggest that Northern Ireland is as unreconstructed a patriarchy as you will find in the first world. In Northern Ireland there hasn't been a woman MP, of course, for 20 years, and needless to say there isn't the remotest chance of a woman MEP.
Even at local government level - often too dull for the men - women occupy only 15 per cent of places. Take middle-class women in public life who have organisational skills - the kind who in other cultures are now in politics if they want to be.
In Northern Ireland, to take an example in the environmental area, there are five female chairpersons, all unpaid, and 34 male, of whom eight are paid. In the educational area there is one female to 15 male chairpersons. In medium to small businesses women comprise 29 per cent of administrators and managers. Women's salaries in that area are 71 per cent of men's.
Not surprisingly, the men Monica and Pearl worked with at the peace talks, whether their personal style was thuggish or wily, and whatever they may have felt privately, were alike in treating the women as subordinates.
Pearl Sagar is no shrinking violet. She is from working-class east Belfast, and she left school at 16. But, "the men from some of the parties hunted in packs. I hated it when they were playing sectarianism or sexism. But when it was really political, I loved it. And it was all the more challenging because there were so many men and so few of us.
"We helped to make the agreement. We'll be out there in the run-up to the referendum promoting the agreement. But we have hardly any chance of getting to implement the agreement."
That's what Pearl and Monica say. And even if against all the odds they did manage to get one member elected: "Do we want to do that to some woman? Send her in there on her own, against all that male bonding?" These are questions that were debated 20 years ago in other countries, including the Republic.
At this very time, Gemma Hussey is among the experienced former politicians who run workshops in eastern Europe, on behalf of the EU, to introduce women to the political process and to induct them into what has always been a monolithically male milieu. Any sign of anyone in Northern Ireland setting up that kind of workshop or in any way validating the struggle of the Women's Coalition? No. No sign.
The whole thing is such a waste that when I was talking to the women last week in Belfast I mentioned our own Seanad. Maybe Monica - who struck so many chords when she was on The Late Late Show, and who is so strikingly able - would canvass to be appointed to that? She looked at me in astonishment. "Oh, no!" she said. "This is my place. Here." And then she said what you don't often hear said. "I love it here. I love Northern Ireland."