Not for the first time while the IRA is centre-stage, loyalist paramilitaries in the wings go right on doing their stuff. Fionnuala O Connor writes.
Republicans have exhausted goodwill in three governments and filled reservoirs of cynicism about their ultimate aims. Not entirely but largely because of the IRA, there is no gloss left on a peace process that once heartened many.
But even when republican double-dealing has been at its most blatant, nobody has doubted that it has a leadership, often formidable. The trouble with loyalists is that they have neither leaders nor a role.
How long ago it seems that the now defunct loyalist fringe parties professed to be about to see off Paisley the dinosaur. There was that night-time rally outside Stormont before the Good Friday agreement was signed, when loyalists supporting the tiny Progressive Unionist party (PUP) and the even less substantial Ulster Democratic party (UDP) in negotiations came close to mobbing the elderly DUP leader.
It looked like a turning point and was nothing of the sort. The dinosaur rallied and adapted; the radical-sounding voices of the future were the ones who became extinct.
The baseless complaint that journalists gave Sinn Féin an easy run during the Troubles became true of fringe loyalists. Voices from the unionist community offering honest acknowledgement of discrimination, outspoken criticism of unionist leadership: government and media willed them on. Loyalist politics however had the slightest of foundations and went under fast.
Republican prisoners for the most part came out of jail to support the agreement and the peace process. Most of the loyalists released, without even a pretext of a war against the IRA to fight any longer, put their energies almost exclusively into crime. Republican leadership stayed firmly in the hands of militarists evolving, sometimes with painful slowness, beyond perpetual, futile war. The leadership of loyalism stayed with militarists of primeval stamp, briefly licensing political wings without any real idea of where they wanted to go.
The loyalist future - for a time - turned out to be Johnny Adair, not Gary McMichael and Davy Adams. The UDA shut down the UDP. The UVF has an unresolved war with the breakaway LVF. This year Progressive Unionists won 1,000 fewer votes for council seats than the tiny brand-new Greens.
David Ervine is the last of the once prominent loyalist political figures still asked for public comment. His grittier former colleague Billy Hutchinson long ago lost status and eventually, his voters, by trying to retain credibility in the streets during feuding on the Shankill and the disaster for loyalism at Holy Cross school.
The uncharitable suspect Ervine has survived by sheer garrulousness, cushions of words between him and the deluge, with voters in east Belfast choosing the most familiar name and voice.
The PUP has been undermined, he declares, by government, by Sinn Féin and the IRA, by the International Monitoring Commission and the machinations of British intelligence.
A PUP website, with true Ervinian grandiloquence, vows to continue "regardless of attempts to politicise crime and criminalise politics". He still sounds off with statesman-like gravitas, though he admits he no longer has influence with the UVF, responsible for the majority of killings in recent years.
This week Ervine had to deal, at least verbally, with the imminence of an IRA declaration that it was going out of business and the spectacle of the UVF inventing a new form of community policing. About 300 hooded youths milled about for hours on the footpaths of an east Belfast housing estate, hands in their pockets, faces hidden, intent on spooking LVF-ers alleged to be drug-dealers. Police and soldiers stood well back.
A removal crew cleared a house, watched by about 30 men. There were claims that people had been afraid to complain about loud parties, even to call taxis of their choice.
The estate is only yards from the Police Service training college at Garnerville.
What are the lessons for better policing? Ervine said he "couldn't condone what has been happening but it would seem the security forces have not been able to help the people here".
As for the two recent killings thought to have been by the UVF, it seemed intent, he said, on wiping out the LVF. It had stopped debating whether to follow the IRA into a new mode: "There was a consultation going on which has stopped - because they were busy doing other things, it would seem."
As for the IRA move, Ervine would "be looking for the IRA to say the war is over and for the abandonment of armed struggle". That gave a regular west Belfast contributor to the UTV news website the perfect moment. "Hold on," he wrote, "until I pick myself up off the floor." Loyalist paramilitaries have always said, of course, that IRA decommissioning will not influence them. The week of yet another new start contained dark reminders of the problems that remain.