A DUP spokesman in a strop is almost mandatory. On the other hand, an Alliance party conference venting rage is a curiosity, even now with poor old Alliance bumping along the bottom and having lost through resignation Lord Alderdice, its former leader. So who made Alliance glare and the DUP smile? Step forward Angela Smith, Direct Rule minister with responsibility for education (and a few other areas) who announced last week that she would not approve four new integrated schools. One has been knocked back twice before, writes Fionnuala O Connor
The minister said, and the DUP concurred, that falling enrolment made it inappropriate to give new integrated schools financial backing.
The integrated schools movement, its champions in Alliance and frustrated parents left choiceless by the decision were swift to retort that rejecting the schools would neither increase nor reduce the empty places in existing schools. Alliance vice-president Colm Cavanagh, long an integrated schools activist, said he was "enraged" and the decision shamed the Blair government, which has explicitly advocated integrated education as a tool of reconciliation in the segregated North.
But ministers were now effectively telling children who wanted to integrate to go to segregated schools, he said. Yet "Do you say to Protestant children 'There are empty desks in Catholic schools, go there?' No, you do not." Pointing out inconsistency, however, produces no blushes since the dilution of the Blair government's much-vaunted education policy, built around commitment to parental choice.
A diminished prime minister, to take only one example, thinks it unproductive to take on the vocal lobby for grammar schools at home - while facing a similar lobby down in Northern Ireland as secondary education is overhauled in the wake of the axed Eleven Plus examination.
Grizzled Northern teachers in both the largely Protestant state sector and in Catholic schools concede that enrolment has been falling for as long as anyone can remember.
Today's direct rulers inherited a raft of tiny schools, rural and urban, kept open because of parental wishes and political sensitivity.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the majority are Protestant. A major review of the "schools estate" to include number and physical condition of schools, empty desks and likely future enrolment is due to begin soon.
The integrated schools rejected for the first time are proposals for a primary between the Co Down villages of Moira and Hillsborough, another in the Clogher Valley and a secondary in the Saintfield/Carryduff area, in Co Down south-east of Belfast. Lir Primary in Ballycastle, Co Antrim, now three times unlucky, is already functioning with the support of a philanthropic American couple. Lir's previous rejections have been on the same basis; that there are three primaries already in the small town "with surplus capacity". But Ballycastle's existing "controlled" primary - largely Protestant in enrolment and staffing - is applying for "transformation" to integrated status. The "transformation" option is by far the route preferred by officialdom, because it costs least. It involves grant-aid and supposedly, consciousness-raising to change atmosphere, staffing and pupil composition by recruiting more Catholic pupils. (No Catholic school has ever tried to transform.)
Finance is available in particular to hire a suitably-qualified teacher - Catholic - to reassure interested parents that the school can prepare their children for first confession and communion. Never more than patchily successful, say insiders: a potentially scandalous pretence.
An inadequately "transformed" controlled/state/Protestant school is not the dream of the parents who have so painfully supported Lir and started launch groups in the other three districts.
After years of assurance by direct rulers that they favour integrated education, Michael Wardlow who heads the Council for Integrated Education wants to meet Angela Smith to ask if the government has changed its policy. Some parents are discussing seeking a judicial review. Reasonably enough, given the Blair trumpeting of parental choice, the mantras about letting successful schools grow, failing schools close.
As a one-time active supporter of integrated schools and mother of two pupils who went through primary and secondary level in the sector, I have to declare an interest. Scarcely a hobbyhorse, though: nearly three years ago this space described the prime movers in integrated education as parents brought up in a segregated place who want more for their children - a yearning sharpened by political stagnation.
In a week when yet again the governments appear lost for ideas on how to bring the DUP and Sinn Féin to share power, Labour in Northern Ireland has hobbled one of its own pet projects. It may be purely a question of timing: the forthcoming review may produce different decisions. In the meantime, knocking back integrated schooling is a popular direct rule move, pleasing the Catholic school sector and delighting the DUP: a cross-community winner because it keeps children apart.