Sinn Féin strides about with that look of readiness for the next election, says Fionnuala O Connor
No matter about Michael McDowell's latest anathema and the charge of criminality and uncleanness, no matter who reads them lessons on responsibility, the republican collective leadership sit back of an evening now and count their votes. What, they ask, are the two governments going to do about implementing the agreement?
Meanwhile observers peer into what they hope is Peter Robinson's soul, speculating ever more wildly about the state of play and players in the Kremlin of the DUP. With a touch of long-suppressed amusement because they need no longer struggle to empathise, the watchers note David Trimble disappearing into renewed theological dispute about procedures for the disciplining of Jeffrey Donaldson, David Burnside, Martin Smyth. Or not, as before.
Like the rest of the political world, those supposedly steering the process look away from a sad SDLP. Averted eyes contain a stubborn mix of guilt, irritation and what could grow up to be sheer dislike. There are limits to sympathy, and many had reached them before the count.
Perhaps dismay is not as deep as it might be about the emergence of such unpromising counterparts as Sinn Féin and the DUP, simply because the pre-election situation was such an unrewarding slog. A big freeze isn't such a terrible outlook if you thought the existing climate was pretty bleak.
The most unsentimental view is that UUs and SDLP had never built a mutual understanding. The UUs are paralysed by internal combat, the SDLP exhausted, so why not move on to the next round, however bruising it may be?
Unionist and Alliance vote-monitors claim their people stayed home because they prefer direct rule to on-again-off-again devolution: they didn't trust republicans, were alienated by the split UUs. Some admit that many middle-class Protestants would always have preferred direct rule, thank you very much, to that crowd up in Stormont. Ill-bred yobs, overpaid, overstaffed with many of their own relatives, littering marbled corridors once ordered by their betters.
It is not a pretty argument. Better, however, than admitting that defeat by Ian Paisley was preferable to voting across the divide, for the pro-agreement, dubiously nationalist, but definitely non-unionist SDLP.
Even facing the headlights of the oncoming DUP, Mr Trimble and his dwindling support team couldn't bring themselves to ask for transfers to pro-agreement candidates. Pro-Union or nothing was the watchword. Transfer to the enemy within, he directed, even though they were coming for his scalp. Poring over the evidence, the experts construct a familiar picture.
As one said with wholly unprofessional emotion: "We get two blocs which, in life as in the election, don't mutually transfer, and within those blocs, two hard parties."
In the process, the tiddlers in the middle got run over. In 1998 the four big parties took almost 79 per cent of the vote, in 2003 almost 89 per cent. Alliance won almost 53,000 first preferences five years ago, 6.5 per cent: this time it was 25,400 and 3.7 per cent.
In the glow of Good Friday and the referendum the Women's Coalition came from nowhere and won 13,000 votes, a tiny 1.6 per cent but still remarkable. In this year of grey reality, 5,800 people stuck with them, 0.83 per cent of the poll. They ceased to be at Stormont level and cling to political life in the form of a single councillor.
What happened to "the Women" is for many watchers the story in miniature of the agreement: glad confident morning departed for ever, a vanished glimpse of another kind of politics.
You didn't have to be female, as a jaded political reporter once said, to appreciate that the long-gone Pearl Sagar and Monica McWilliams brought humour and humanity into predominantly male and monochrome Northern politics.
When Ian Paisley jnr and other DUP-ers repeatedly made those mooing noises while McWilliams spoke in an agriculture debate, they spoke more than they knew about the nature of their dislike of her and Sagar, their wordless hatred for the coalition.
And what happened to McWilliams in South Belfast, home of the city's chattering class? She faced Alliance and SDLP people fighting to survive, with Sinn Féin's ex-lord mayor, Alec Maskey, sweeping in, and the transfers she needed evaporated. "A third of her vote went back to unionists, a third to the SDLP, and a third stayed with her," said a friend.
There is real regret for the loss of a fresh voice. It was a male observer who feared that "we're probably in for more macho stuff now", more Sinn Féin posturing and DUP catcalls to cheer their ill-prepared grassroots. Yet there is hope, even in the contraction of the middle ground. The centre is crowded because the main parties have piled into it, their movement hidden by the smoke of battle.