Colour me cynical… Policing, SF and the DUP. Or who is blinking and who is bluffing?

Strange, reading this earlier today. The policing issue has clearly become crucial to the further implementation of the Good Friday Agreement in it’s current form. And yet the news emanating from both Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party is far from good.

Firstly, and this is hardly a surprise, I entirely support the GFA and would encourage SF to sign up to policing (not that they’re likely to be listening to me). In this I don’t entirely agree with Wednesday’s analysis, although I share much of it. And yet, I do tend to agree with SF that the lack of any positive signs from the DUP, indeed let’s be honest, the opposite in terms of apparently putting up new conditions for entry into a power-sharing Executive, would seem to indicate a breach of faith on that party’s behalf. And in that context I’d think they might be justified (considering the very real risks they are taking with regard to the integrity of their movement) in holding back at this point.

Still, a small part of me wonders whether this isn’t exactly the outcome I’d want at this particular juncture in the Peace Process if I were in Sinn Féin.

Let me explain. SF’s bona fides with both Dublin and London must be close to unquestionable at this point. By actually moving towards calling a special Conference on policing they indicated that they were fully locked into the process. As a token of good faith it’s hard to see how it could be beat. That’s not to say that the interests of all three are identical, far from it, nor that SF has a clear agenda of it’s own and one which - one presumes - sees perhaps a very different end-goal for this process. But of course, and here I’m stating the obvious, these bona fides must have a destabilising effect upon their base to a greater or lesser extent. It’s not just the rumblings on Politics.ie where the anti-GFA posters are out in much greater force than usual. There are many more important straws in the wind that indicate frayed nerves from that majority of Republicans still supportive of PSF (and while on this subject on the dissident side has there ever been anything more absurd than the ‘what us?’, ‘butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths’ posturing over death threats to Adams et al? Perhaps it’s me but anti-GFA formations appear to be slipping into a form of political neurosis bordering on the pathological).

So, let’s assume the DUP doesn’t do the decent thing and make a few supportive noises sufficient to allow an Ard Fheis to proceed and ultimately move towards a powersharing administration. What then?

Well, bad news for Blair. There goes the best part of the legacy. Or if one is being particularly unkind the only part of the legacy. Good news for Dublin (and FF) though if a real measure of joint authority is the outcome. The de facto extension of the national territory with none of the pain of traditional means? Happy days. For the Unionists it’s a bit of a disaster. They didn’t like the Anglo-Irish Agreement one little bit, and this surely would be AIA Mk II, particularly if the cross border element was strengthened by a Labour government feeling particularly merciless in the wake of Unionism blinking yet once more (and it’s notable how ‘tough love’ seems to be the order of the day in the North under Peter Hain from tax increases to the reconfiguration of local authorities).

But for SF, seen as a constructive player by Dublin and London, this would represent an opportunity to take a deep breath and a good couple of steps back towards the sort of politics of opposition which has served it so well in the past. They can truthfully hold up their hands and say, ‘we did everything that was asked of us, but it wasn’t enough’. Ideal, isn’t it for a party about to go before the polls in the South in the next four or five months who can expect perhaps some dividend for having been seen to stand up for principle on the issue of policing? And ideal too as a means of bringing back some of those for who policing was, at this point, a step too far.

The next week will, as Ahern notes, reveal all.

But if I were in the DUP I’d be thinking long and hard about making the North a little less of a cold house for Republicans… because in the final analysis it is they and not Sinn Féin who may have most to lose if the process stalls.