LETTER FROM AMERICA/Patrick Smyth: Mark Durkan told a somewhat risqué story on Wednesday night. He had been with David Trimble, he said, to visit Richard Haass, the US "point man" on Northern Ireland, and on his host's desk had seen two books - a map of Afghanistan and a book of aerial photos of Northern Ireland. Terrible thoughts of what the US had in mind for Northern Ireland crossed his mind, he said.
I thought the laughter in the room was a little nervous, but Haass took it in good sorts, joking that "sometimes a book is just a book, and a map is just a map". The occasion was the formal opening here, just a few blocks from the White House, of the new Northern Ireland Bureau, the second of the Northern Ireland Executive's "embassies". Brussels was first, last week.
Their establishment reflects an important new symbolic landmark in what the First Minister, Mr Trimble, spoke of as the "maturity" of the devolved institutions. Both offices have their origins in far more limited operations under the wings of the respective British ambassadors and one Irish voice was heard to delight on Wednesday that "at last Northern Ireland is out of the British embassy".
The head of the office, Peter Smyth, was more circumspect, paying tribute to the ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer and insisting that the experience had been a good one. Sources suggest, however, that there had been minor tensions, not least when the new Bush administration came to office and Northern politicians were queuing up for access to the White House. Sir Christopher's priorities were clearly to get Tony Blair in there first.
Smyth, a Queen's graduate and career Northern-Ireland civil servant whose experience spans fair employment legislation to electricity privatisation, has been here since 1997. There was a good crowd too, reflecting not only the two diplomatic communities, but a strong sprinkling of American-Irish politics, a few Congressmen, as well as that noted friend of Ireland, former Senator George Mitchell.
Of course we are not really talking about "embassies", but "bureaux", as the former are very much the prerogative of sovereign states. The conduct of foreign diplomacy has traditionally been one of the hallmarks of the national authority, although as Ireland's ambassador here, Sean O hUigín, pointed out, traditional "Lloyd George" notions of sovereignty are fast evolving these days in the face of interactions with bodies like the EU, which is more than willing to enter dialogue with bodies at substate level. Brussels' streets are lined with regional representations. Indeed, a survey by the Scottish Assembly suggests that as much as 80 per cent of the legislation affecting the daily lives of ordinary people is now emanating from Brussels. Regions often have quite distinct interests which national embassies find it hard to represent. In Northern Ireland's case agriculture has always been a case in point, with the London-led delegation, for example, refusing initially to argue an exemption to the beef ban for the province - in the belief that such an exemption might delay the lifting of the ban for the rest of the UK.
The relationship to the regions is institutionalised, albeit weakly, in the Committee of the Regions, but a smaller group, representing regions with a special constitutional standing, ranging from Catalonia to the German lander, is now making a case to the Convention on the future of Europe for a special status. Durkan says the Northern Ireland Executive is particularly interested in the group's ideas - a constitutional dimension to their work which, unlike most other constitutional questions in the North, can unite nationalist and unionist.
The EU even provides a little- known incentive to regions to seek more devolved authority - the right under EU rules of the Northern Ireland Executive, for example, to set corporate tax rates comparable to those in the Republic and therefore different from those in London, is a function of how much tax-raising powers London devolves to it. Currently it could not do so even if London approved.
In the US the five-person bureau's role is also political, opening doors for politicians from all parties to meet their counterparts at every level of politics and officialdom, a service it also provides for business people. As well as promoting an understanding of developments in the North, it has a major role to perform in promoting investment and trade.
At the opening the Trimble/Durkan double act was seamless, each deferring to the other with an easy naturalness that suggested the act had been on the road a lot longer than it has. Their speeches complemented each other while reflecting subtle genuflections to their own constituencies.
And, as more than one person noted, the preoccupation with the mundane, even the boring, rather than the latest death toll or paramilitary "spectacular", is a mark of a how much the times have changed. Truly we were witnessing a new dispensation.