It may have been an off-the-cuff comment, or a studied insult designed to appeal to his unnerved supporters, but David Trimble's suggestion that Sinn Fein needed to be "house-trained" set the tone for the week in Northern Ireland.
Dog metaphors resonate strongly in unionism, which has a deep-seated fear of getting wagged by the tail, or of lying down in places where it might get up with fleas. So Mr Trimble's implicit message that he would return to the power-sharing Executive with a leash in one hand and a box of flea-powder in the other was probably deliberate, coming in the wake of his uncomfortably narrow win in the Ulster Unionist Council vote.
Indeed, one of the young Turks of the pro-Trimble camp, Steven King, developed the idea further in a column in Thursday's Belfast Telegraph. Reviewing a real or imagined book called Training Your Rottweiler, he noted that the key to dealing with the breed was knowing it had been designed for "hunting and herding". Understanding the reasons behind the aggression would help you control it, he added, although the book had also cautioned against "leaving children of any age alone with a rottweiler until he is completely socialised".
Clearly, unionists are still struggling with the idea of Martin McGuinness as Minister of Education, even on the principle that the hair of the dog that bit you can sometimes be a cure.
Conscious of the power of language, Sinn Fein hit back at the UUP leader's "racist" remark. Gerry Adams wanted it both ways: demanding an apology he said he didn't expect, and then adding that the dog comparison was acknowledgement by David Trimble that republicans wouldn't roll over and be tickled. But the party also launched a retaliatory, no-warning metaphor, when the Education Minister likened unionism's political progress to his infant grandson's attempts to walk.
Republican babies have uncanny political instincts and, according to Mr McGuinness, his grandson took his first unsupported steps last Saturday, even as the UUC was voting, in its rather wobbly way, to return to the Executive. It was about time for unionism, too, to "let go of the furniture", he said.
In a week when the billboard outside a Baptist church on Great Victoria Street featured the curious message: "The more you talk, the more you are likely to sin" (Proverbs 10,19), none of the political parties was taking the advice. Insults flew as freely as ever in the North; and yet, beneath all the verbal jousting, there was an unmistakeable sense of people getting down to business.
Stormont was boringly functional during the week. And even at City Hall, where in past years if unionists let go of the furniture, it would be to throw it at the Sinn Fein councillors, the election of a new mayor passed without any real rancour. True, the unionist bloc combined again to thwart the election of a member of the council's biggest party; but Sinn Fein appeared to take the vote and the accompanying lecture from the new mayor, Sammy Wilson, on the chin.
The Alliance Party, which along with the SDLP supported Alex Maskey's mayoral bid, accused the UUP of "breathtaking hypocrisy" in both opposing a Sinn Fein candidate and then supporting the election of a deputy mayor from the UDP, the political wing of the UFF.
But the unionist retrenchment was predictable. In the week that was in it, a Sinn Fein mayor of Belfast would have been just too much to swallow. And although Sammy Wilson didn't go down very easily either (the PUP's David Ervine cast his vote for him through gritted teeth), his election to the honorary role was probably expedient in the calming of unionist nerves.
Even more expedient was Wednesday's double announcement of 1,200 jobs at Shorts and a prospective order of two cruise liners for Harland & Wolff. With a timing that Martin McGuinness's grandson would admire, David Trimble was able to give the Shorts announcement his blessing on Wednesday, the morning after the DUP's latenight decision on how best to "wreck" the executive. The pictures of Mr Trimble and the Deputy First Minister, Seamus Mallon, announcing jobs in the heart of Protestant East Belfast placed the DUP's tactics in unflattering relief.
By Thursday, the DUP deputy leader, Peter Robinson, was accentuating the positive in his party's rotating-ministers strategy, denying it would disrupt the work of the departments involved and implying there would be continuity in what the party's stand-in ministers did. It was obvious by then that the DUP was having another each-way bet: hoping to ride the No campaign to victory at the next general election, but with a covering stake in government, in case Mr Trimble's gamble paid off.
The Shorts and H&W successes seemed as carefully choreographed as the announcement that the British army would remove observation towers in North and West Belfast, which came on the same day Gerry Adams planted 20 oak trees on the site of a former army barracks on Springfield Road. If this was a case of heavy-on-the-symbolism, Gerry, the gesture was at least of benefit to the environment, arguably more than you could say about the unionists' planting Sammy Wilson at City Hall.
And symbolism is as big as ever in Northern Ireland, as the decision by the two Sinn Fein Ministers not to fly the Union Jack yesterday, and the retaliation-in-advance by loyalists who draped British and UVF flags from the lampposts outside the Department of Education headquarters, illustrated. The more serious matters of a bomb in London and two paramilitary murders within a few days were also reminders, not that anyone needed them, that the peace process continues to be fraught.
The pro-agreement parties appear at least as grimly determined to make the latest deal work as the anti-agreement camp is to bring it down. Meanwhile the public seems to be losing interest, which may be a good sign. But except for Belfast's taxi drivers, nobody seems certain of anything.