Another August bank holiday weekend, almost half a decade since the Good Friday agreement and the North is still with us. Not just with us, but with another murderous bomb let loose.
It is going to be a tense few days as the new proposals are examined but Drapier is not holding his breath. As he sees it, too many people are too dug in, the mood for compromise is conspicuous by its absence and too many groups have their own veto.
Drapier has no intention of going into the wearying details. He commends the patience of both governments and applauds the back-breaking efforts of the officials. Their efforts have been extraordinary and sustained, their patience supreme and their inventiveness never ending. But whether it will all amount to a solution becomes daily more doubtful.
What is it about the North that so many people prefer the integrity of their grievances to finding a solution?
But it is more than that. The real nastiness is coming to the surface again. Those who want to destroy the process in the only way they know how are once again dangerously strong.
What sort of a society can allow loyalist gunmen to operate with such murderous impunity? And what sort of mindset convinces the so-called "Real IRA" that it has a moral right to bomb and to murder in face of the manifest wishes of the vast majority of the people in both parts of the island?
There is a strange sense of detachment down here about events in the North. The euphoria and relief which followed the Good Friday agreement are now mere memories. Most people don't want to talk about it, not just because they are bored, but because they have run out of things to say.
It is a question of leaving it to the two governments and hoping that something can be established. At this stage Drapier feels that things will get even worse before anything happens.
Meanwhile, the silly season is well and truly with us. The Houses are quiet and the last of the committees has closed down for the August duration. Even the tribunals are running out of steam. It would be easier to find a quorum at the Galway races than in Leinster House at present, and that is the way it should be.
There is no mistaking, though, the growing unease about the economy. The indicators everywhere point to a downturn and the scale of the job losses is spectacular if not yet frightening.
If Bertie Ahern was hoping to go to the country on the back of economic good feeling he has missed the boat, and when Mary Harney starts talking about better services rather than lower taxes we know the hatches are being battened down.
Drapier has long felt that only one factor has inhibited the Government from going to the country before now - it has no evidence that it would come back with a majority. Nobody believes the PDs would gain any seats while Fianna Fail, as things stand, are more likely to lose than win seats. It is this factor, and this alone, which has dictated the Government's desire to stay in power as long as possible. If you wait long enough something might just turn up.
Opinion in here is divided. The long-grass merchants believe the public is waiting out there for this Government just as they lurked for Dick Spring in 1997. Too many groups are nursing their own grievances, the Celtic Tiger has been patchy and missed out in many areas and there is a sense, too, of a Government grown stale from being too long in power.
On the other hand, there are those who argue that the Government will return by default. The main opposition parties have yet to offer a credible alternative and in the end it will be a reluctant Fianna Fail/Labour combination which will emerge.
One way or another Sinn Fein has been attracting the attention of the August pundits, and Drapier read with interest Mark Hennessy's very good series on Sinn Fein and its electoral prospects in the Republic. He was particularly taken by Garret FitzGerald's acerbic comment, "You murder people for 30 years. Then you stop and call yourself the peace party."
It certainly is a galling fact of life for many of those who sustained constitutional democratic politics through the long dark days to have to take lectures from people who a short while ago were up to their necks in murder and devastation and whose most outstanding characteristic was their utter contempt for the democratic process. If it is difficult for us down here, how much more difficult it must be for the SDLP and the mainline unionist parties.
History is rarely fair and few groups less deserve the fate now being meted out to the SDLP. It has become fashionable to write off the SDLP, lacking as they do the "glamour"' of the bomb and the bullet and whose moderation and decency handicaps them in an increasingly polarised and sectarian society. There is little doubt that sectarian passions now run deeper in the North than at any time since the start of the Troubles and it is this more than anything else which has marginalised the SDLP.
In Drapier's view the new Sinn Fein operation in the Republic is good - well-financed, focused, hungry, disciplined and with an organisation which could teach the old "Stickies" a thing or two about democratic centralism.
It has a number of distinct advantages at present, in particular the fact that all major parties occupy the middle ground leaving the left as a vacant site. It has become the party of protest, the anti-establishment party, the one party in a position to shake up the system.
But it also has a number of negatives. The North and the violence are still a big turn-off for many Southern voters. The calibre of the emerging Sinn Fein politicians is very mixed. For example, its councillors have made no impact on Dublin Corporation - unlike Sinn Fein the Workers' Party of the 1980s.
There is, too, a view assiduously spread that Sinn Fein are the new masters of local politics. But this is to miss the point that most of our TDs, senators and councillors spend a lot of their time doing little else and are no slouches when it comes to delivering on local issues. It simply is not true that the only people active on the ground are Sinn Fein.
Drapier also is minded that historically the left has never been particularly strong in this country. Fianna Fail was a leftwing party once but it very quickly became the establishment. Clann na Poblachta was another left-wing party, but it lasted only a couple of years.
So Drapier is not necessarily convinced that there is a huge natural constituency there for Sinn Fein. What he does say, however, is that Sinn Fein has created a real sense of presence in many areas and a capacity to identify in a way other politicians have not.