Joint sovereignty

It's not about pot, but is it a cure for the hallucinations of the DUP?

After the euphoria of the Good Friday Agreement, the 'hand of history' and all that, we had a semi-devolved government which worked OK but was blown apart by the alleged scheming of UK government agencies along the lines of a Cold War novel. The fallout from this political Nagasaki is still settling.

Although the IRA has disarmed, the biggest elected party (the DUP) refuses to believe it and therefore refuses to work with Sinn Féin (many reckon it refuses to work with Sinn Féin and justifes this by refusing, against all odds, to believe the IRA has decommissioned). The only word they can say is 'no'.

So while the wee boys are squabbling in the playground, headmaster Tony Blur and housemaster Peter Hain are threatening to introduce joint sovereignty (by UK and Éire), which is to Ian Paisley the equivalent of inviting Osama bin Laden to run the London Borough of Hackney.

I hope Blur's strategy works. I hope it shocks the DUP into being as committed to democracy as Socialist Republicanism now claims to be. If the "D" in its name has any meaning, it must recognise the electoral mandate of Sinn Féin and the SDLP and set about working with them to create a fully devolved, representative, partnership-style government in Belfast.