Dreary steeples. Watching paint dry. It was a week for the old clichés. Ian Paisley's abusive outburst about Brian Cowen came right on cue as if to make the point, writes Mark Brennock.
This hackneyed view that the integrity of the ancient quarrel remains unchanged and unchangeable is, however, unjustified. Politicians from two governments and (almost) all political parties in Northern Ireland have proved dramatically over the last decade that politics works.
February 1992 was a horrible month in the North. Four young IRA men were ambushed by the SAS and shot dead after they attacked Coalisland's joint British army/RUC station. Locals reported that as they left the scene of the attack just before they were killed, the men on the back of the truck cheered defiantly. One was aged 22, two were 21 and one was 20.
A few weeks earlier at Teebane Cross the IRA had killed eight Protestant civilians who had been working on a military base. Five days later British agent Brian Nelson pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to murder and was sentenced to 10 years. That February an off-duty RUC officer shot dead three civilians including two Sinn Féin members in Sinn Féin's west Belfast office. The next day, the UDA shot dead five Catholic civilians including a 15-year-old boy in Sean Graham's betting shop on the Ormeau Road. A 250-pound IRA bomb devastated part of central Belfast. Another at a London underground station injured 28 people.
Meanwhile, the talks process initiated by Northern Secretary Peter Brooke was winding down in advance of a general election - if a process that never really got wound up could be said to be winding down. And yet the seeds of extraordinary change were being sown during that period. Against the background of apparent unending violence and failed politics this reporter went to talk to a senior republican. I asked him about statements from Sinn Féin figures challenging the two governments to show them an alternative to violence. Optimists had interpreted these comments as a signal that republicans were prepared to explore a move into politics and away from paramilitarism. Most observers, however - including this one - saw such a development as out of the question.
"Look", said the senior republican. "We are trying to lead our people in a certain direction. But we will only lead them as far as they will go." He reminisced about the early 1970s, when he was part of a group of younger republicans, including Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Tom Hartley, who had decided the older republican leadership "hadn't the bottle for the fight".
So they decided to take over the movement, and they had succeeded. "But did you see those four young men killed by the SAS in Tyrone?" he asked. Were they now eyeing Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and the rest of them who were talking about peace and compromise and thinking what they had once thought: "They haven't the bottle for the fight?"
The senior republican was saying that the leadership wanted to bring the republican movement into politics and away from the paramilitary campaign, but didn't know if they could succeed. I didn't know whether to believe him then. I do now. Sure, there is still no unambiguous IRA commitment to end punishment beatings, the procurement of arms and all the rest of it. But compared to February 1992 - or almost any other month in the two decades before that - there has not just been a modest incremental change but a transformation.
And despite the fashion for depicting unionism as the unchanging dinosaur blocking progress, unionists have led the transformation too. Back in the early 1990s, Ulster Unionists held out for months on end before agreeing even to talk to the Irish government. Now they have sat in government with Sinn Féin. David Trimble has risked his political career, holding out against rejectionists in his party by a wafer-thin majority at times. And before sneering at how he sometimes seems to show contempt for republicans, remember that some of Mr Trimble's friends and associates were murdered by some of Mr Adams's friends and associates.
The SDLP and particularly its former leader, John Hume, led this process in the early days, suffered the most appalling abuse for attempts to bring Sinn Féin into the fold, and wrote the script for the Belfast Agreement. SDLP politicians have suffered threats and attacks from all sides - many have chosen not to publicise these incidents and just got on with it. For their trouble they face the possibility of electoral eclipse by Sinn Féin. Then there are the leaders of the Irish and British governments and the often unsung heroes among the officials of both administrations who have devoted enormous amounts of their lives to making this work.
Politicians are sometimes courageous, sometimes cynical. Sometimes their hopes lead them to take risks; sometimes their fears lead them to retreat from a challenge. A bit like the rest of us. But the last decade has shown spectacularly that effective politicians can bring extraordinary change.
Every reporter who covered Northern Ireland in the darker days has memories that will never leave them of destruction and death, and of being in the living rooms of the newly-dead, now occupied by devastated widows and children, and trying to write words to portray the horror of what was routine.
Now, watching Northern Ireland may indeed sometimes be like watching paint dry. But wet paint looks a lot better than what went before, and it does dry in the end. The process is in difficulty, but has been in difficulty before. Northern Ireland has in the last 10 years provided the proof that politics work.