So, on to the Third Doctor books, starting with three Dicks efforts of varying quality, and a good one by Malcolm Hulke; all covering stories first broadcast in 1970.

( 6) Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, by Terrance Dicks )
( 7) Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke )
( 8) Doctor Who - the Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks )
( 9) Doctor Who - Inferno, by Terrance Dicks )

( Northern Ireland and Doctor Who )

I've headlined this post by referring to Liz Shaw, but in fact she doesn't come across particularly well on the printed page and, given my childhood memories of the first two of these books, I was surprised by how much I liked Caroline John in the TV role when I watched. I am beginning to spot a pattern where the brainy companions (Zoe and Liz) don't transfer well to the novelisations, whereas the screamy ones (Victoria, Polly and I expect Jo) actually come over rather better.

Jeff Dudgeon alerts me to the Dublin Review of Books, "a free quarterly online journal whose main object is the publication of clear and thoughtful analysis based on recently published books". Various articles to browse through at my leisure, many from the perspective, more visible in intellectual discourse than in election results, of the Irish Left. I particularly enjoyed two pieces from the current issue:

Tony Brown on Irish Euroscepticism. I know Tony as a very nice guy involved with the Institute of European Affairs in Dublin, where I have spoken a couple of times. Here he lets his passion out, exposing the mendacity of the anti-EU cause in Ireland. I recommend it especially to British friends to see how the issue plays out in the neighbouring jurisdiction. However, it should also be noted that the anti-EU forces have lost every time in Ireland, if sometimes only on the second round. (Also I notice that the article, despite being in the Dublin Review of Books, doesn't actually cite any, er, books. But it's still very much worth reading.)

Brendan O'Leary on Paul Bew's Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006. Again, an author I know on a subject I know; I first met Bew at the departmental parties our family would host, long before he got my father's old job in Belfast let alone his recent peerage, and O'Leary has greatly flattered me in print. O'Leary's article here attempts to forensically dissect Bew's new blockbuster on the recent history of Ireland, but ends up making me want to buy and read the book, to see what I think of it myself. O'Leary feels that Bew attaches too much strength to the importance of indigenous factors and not enough to external (ie British) influence on events: I'm not sure all of his points are totally convincing, but he makes them very entertainingly. (A minor irritation is that you have to download O'Leary's footnotes in a standalone Word document; in this day and age, that is simply unprofessional.)

Anyway, a site to keep watching. Lots more that I enjoyed browsing through, but as I said, these were the two articles that particularly grabbed me.

The sole elected representative of the Newtownabbey Ratepayers Association, Billy Webb, has announced that he is joining the Alliance Party. Given that the press officer listed on the Association's website, former councillor John Blair, has also (re)joined Alliance, I reckon that's it for one of Northern Ireland's smaller (and more harmless) political groups. Alliance has not been doing badly for new recruits recently.

I've been musing a bit about Hillary Clinton's recent travails on the question of foreign policy. (The details are of interest only for the truly obsessed, but FactChecker has a good summary and I link below to the Washington Post take on each issue.) I can't speak to the Rwanda or China issues, but I do happen to know a bit about the other three areas where there has been some discussion of her activities: Bosnia, Macedonia and Northern Ireland.

On Macedonia, I find her actually the most convincing of the three. This was just after the start of the NATO bombing in March 1999; there were big problems with the management of the flow of refugees driven out of Kosovo by Serbian forces, and the Macedonian government was balancing the country's own internal stability against the demands being made of it by the international community. Clinton's critics find her guilty of some exaggeration because the border was re-opened for refugees the day before her arrival, rather than as a result of her negotiation with the Macedonian authorities. In my view it's clear that her visit must have been part of the overall US and NATO strategy to keep the Macedonians on board (the extent to which Hillary Clinton herself was involved in shaping that policy is, of course, another matter), and the timing of the opening of the border may well have been explicitly linked to her arrival the next day. In politics, cause does sometimes follow effect.

On Northern Ireland, her "instrumental" role was less relevant to the formal political process, dare I say it, than my own (I was the central campaign manager for one of the political parties in the 1996 elections, and worked as an aide to our party's negotiators from June to December 1996, in the course of which my most substantial contribution was probably a paper on decommissioning which I wrote jointly with Stephen Farry.) She is confused on some of the details, but it's fair to say that she was one of the more prominent among many contributors, and by her own choice concentrated on building up cross-community links among women's groups. Her visits to Northern Ireland are only part of the story here, as the Clinton White House also successfully empowered a wider range of people, pulling them into the wider discourse, and presumably she was involved with that. Her schedule reveals significant preparatory work for the Northern Ireland visits on her own part, which is laudable.

On Bosnia, however, the inaccuracy of her recent statements has been extensively documented; her reminiscences are over-dramatic and simply at variance with the facts. It's a bit unfair to assert, as some have, that there was no physical risk to visitors to Tuzla in March 1996 - we did not know then that the deployment of US troops for ten years in Bosnia would pass without a single combat casualty. And I even have some sympathy with her defence that she is merely human and cannot be expected to get everything right. But I cannot escape the feeling that Clinton was more impressed by the way she was hustled into her plane's armoured cockpit for the landing in Tuzla than about anything else that happened on the visit. Her most unnerving experiences - which clearly made an impression - were actually supplied by the US military rather than by any local factors, and her brief moments of contact with actual Bosnians were completely forgotten.

6) Endgame in Ireland, by Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick

This is basically a chronological account of the peace process, starting really from the Brighton bomb in 1984 and finishing in the depressing summer of 2001 when everything appeared to be stalemated. Mallie and McKittrick have used the archives of the four-part BBC series of the same name, which I haven't seen, but which I imagine covers much the same points in much the same way. I didn't really learn a lot from this, except that (as ever) my perceptions of what was happening through the media at the time were only loosely linked with the reality of behind the scenes; and the tale of the internal wranglings of the Ulster Unionist Party are now an incidental detail of history - the real story is now the shift in the DUP approach over the last few years. It's well-written and thorough but has now been overtaken by events.

I was alerted during the week to the fact that the Northern Ireland Boundary Commission has finalised its recommendations for the new parliamentary constituencies, though it now looks like they will not be needed as soon as they might have been. In fact they have stuck to their recommendations from May last year.

In related news, thamks to Conal Kelly, the 1950-1970 Westminster election results for East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, North Antrim, South Antrim, Armagh, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Londonderry, North Down, South Down, and Mid Ulster are all now on my site.

13) Belfast, c. 1600 to c. 1900: The Making of the Modern City, by Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle

This only just about counts as a book, but I'll tally it anyway. It's a 19-page pamphlet produced jointly by the Royal Irish Academy and Belfast City Council, attached to a gorgeous multi-coloured map illustrating the developing historical streetscape, with today's map faintly visible in the background. The landscape we live in is a palimpsest; this little publication helps to establish what was there before.

What is most fascinating is that the defensive walls built in 1642 almost precisely map the security zone I remember well from my childhood. There are one or two shifts of a few metres, but on the whole the twentieth century security gates were placed pretty much on top of where the town's defences had been, a third of a millennium earlier. Extraordinary. (If you consider Dublin's history, by contrast, the commercial heart of the city has slipped about a kilometre downriver over the last thousand years.)

( the central bit of the map )

Anyway, I found it fascinating. Though it missed the charming detail from one of the very early maps of Belfast on display in the Ulster Museum, where the surveyors (presumably brought in by Lord Donegall from elsewhere) recorded the name or "Waring Street" as "Wern Street". Even back then, the locals were capable of baffling outsiders with their accents.

Thursday, 21 June 2007 is an initial Day of Private Reflection.

People from Northern Ireland, Great Britain, Republic of Ireland and further a field are invited to reflect, individually and privately, upon the conflict in and about Northern Ireland and the future that is before us.

The Day of Private Reflection is an opportunity for us all:

• To acknowledge the deep hurt and loss caused by the conflict in and about Northern Ireland,
• To remember the men, women and children who on a daily basis live with the consequences of the conflict,
• To reflect on our own attitudes that might have the potential to negatively impact on others and society,
• To reflect on what more each of use might have done or might still do to uphold and enhance all other people's right to life and quality of life, and
• To make a personal commitment that, as we begin to move forward as a society, such loss should never be allowed to happen again.

For more see the Day of Private Reflection and Healing Through Remembering sites. Or you could post this in your livejournal/blog.

19) Troubled Images: Posters and Images of the Northern Ireland Conflict from the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, ed. Yvonne Murphy, Allan Leonard, Gordon Gillespie and Kris Brown

Lots of pictures here, many of them very familiar to me from my own experience of Northern Ireland politics. The explanatory text is best when it explains the roots of some of the images used; the political commentary, however, has dated rather rapidly.

One thing that surprised me was the prominence of Cedric Wilson as a personality in this side of things. I knew him as a rather buffoonish character at the time I was most involved - he was the one who heckled President Clinton at his speech at Mackies in December 1995, and when I was involved with the Mitchell talks he was still hanging around with Bob McCartney, though they split fairly quickly after the 1998 Assembly elections. But according to this book he designed both the "Ulster Say No" logo of the mid-80s, and the "Heart for Ulster" anti-Agreement logo more recently. I have to honestly confess this is the first I'd heard of it, but presumably the editors did their research, which means I seriously underestimated him.

Not all Unionist posters were as memorable as the ones attributed to Cedric Wilson. I was going to illustrate this post with several bad ones, but realised that this would look rather unbalanced, as none of the Nationalist or Republican ones are particularly bad, while the non-sectarian/ centre grouns oned tend to be a bit wince-making. So I will only give you one, but it is the worst one by far, for the short-lived (and as it turned out ironically named) United Ulster Unionist Party:
( bad poster )

Anyway, enough of that. I will have to buy the CD of all of them next time I am in Belfast.

1) The UN Special negotiator, ex-president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, has recommended independence for Kosovo. See his letter to Ban Ki-Moon here and his full recommendations here.

2) Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams have agreed to govern Northern Ireland together, starting in a few weeks' time. See Slugger O'Toole's quick links to everyone's statements here.

I've been expecting both of these to happen for some time, and in neither case is the story over yet. But it's a big day none the less.

I have now updated the webpage for each constituency on my site - East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, East Antrim, North Antrim, South Antrim, North Down, South Down, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Foyle, Lagan Valley, East Londonderry, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh, Strangford, West Tyrone, and Upper Bann. And the sun has just come out.

Edited to add: I see that the SDLP are criticising Sinn Fein for - get this - daring to canvass and campaign efficiently. The nerve of them, seeking to maximise their vote in order to win more seats! It's pretty clear from the election results that the SDLP would never Stoop to such strategic activity!

I know you have all been dying to watch my seminar yesterday about the Northern Ireland elections last week. Apparently it is now online here. I haven't yet watched it so I have no idea how embarrassing it is (or not). (Edited to add: Needs to be illustrated with the Powerpoint.)

I misjudged the time of driving back down to Dublin airport so missed my flight, and had to get the first one back this morning. However, this did have the unexpected benefit of an evening chez wwhyte, watching our selection of classic Who episodes: he chose The Ambassadors of Death #1 and The Deadly Assassin #1, I picked The Mind Robber #1 and The Dalek Invasion of Earth #3. I had earlier raided his stash of Target novelisations, for reasons which will become clear in due course.

And eventually caught the early plane this morning without incident, and now going home on the train.
------------------

Great fun at P-Con, thanks to all the team for organising it, and good to meet wyvernfriend  (and entourage) at last, as well as catching up with various people (was fortunate enough at dinner on Saturday to be flanked by natural20  and Leah Moore, and opposite mizkit, gaspode_girl  and jemck). I was relieved to not be on any panels (or, to be mopre strictly accurate, to have arrived from Brussels only half way through the second one I was scheduled to be on) because my energy levels were generally low - had done a work trip to a neighbouring country last Thursday, which meant getting up at 5 am for a 9 am meeting.

Have spent yesterday and today driving to Belfast, writing a lecture and then delivering it, which was fun but pretty all-absorbing. I did manage to get hacked into a reception last night at which I bumped into various old friends from my Alliance Party days, including both the current and the former Speakers of the Assembly. Then my lecture was attended by reps from Alliance, the DUP and the Green Party; if there were others there, they did not declare themselves. The whole thing is apparently going to be available as a webcast - will post here when it is online.

And so home this evening; but fortunately I have time for a little bookshopping first.

What with jetlag and work commitments I've found it difficult to get the energy to update the elections website, but have now done so.

What's interesting is the relatively high degree of stasis expected by the punters, with no change predicted by the majority for no less than 12 of the 18 constituencies, and a majority also expecting Arlene Foster to keep her seat in Fermanagh and South Tyrone despite defecting from the UUP to the DUP. Also the vast majority expect David Ervine's seat in East Belfast to go to the DUP.

The other four constituencies, however, are much more difficult to call. Opinion is almost evenly divided on whether or not the DUP can pick up a seat in East LondonDerry from the UUP. This is very difficult to call, with a DUP defector to the UKUP, in a constituency where an independent Unionist unexpectedly broke through in 1998, adding further complexity.

In South Belfast, the vast majority expect the DUP to pick up a seat from the UUP. But the interesting element is the Alliance Party, expected by a third of the punters to pick up a seat here - but who from? (Most likely SF; then possibly the SDLP; some hopefuls think the UUP).

In South Antrim, the vast majority expect Mitchell McLaughlin to pick up a seat for SF; but again, from whom? Most think Alliance's David Ford, but the SDLP are also seen as vulnerable by a minority.

Finally, the majority see three seats changing hands in Lagan Valley, with the DUP likely to keep both its defection gains from the UUP and SF also likely to gain a seat, but whether from the SDLP (slightly more likely) or Alliance (slightly less likely) is unclear.

My wishful thinking is, of course, that Alliance keeps both its difficult defences and wins in South Belfast; don't particularly mind who loses out. This time next week we will know for sure.

jacobsmills has a question about the Alliance Party's slogan.

The 2007 Northern ireland elections contest is now up and running.

And check out sammymorse's commentaries on each constituency.

The Assembly election has now actually been called for 7 March. I will, as usual, be running a prediction contest on my elections website, but that will only be launched one we know who all the candidates are, ie 14 February (to allow for all nominations and withdrawals).

In the meantime, I have been tracking the speculation on the likely results so far:

my own initial thoughts, from December 2006

"Fair Deal" of Slugger O'Toole repeats the exercise, with closer examinations of the situation in the four Belfast constituencies, the three Antrim constituencies, Lagan Valley, North Down and Strangford, Upper Bann, South Down, and Newry and Armagh, and the West. See also on Slugger further debate on Lagan Valley, UUP nominations in Strangford, Conservatives in North Down, SDLP in West Tyrone, the PUP after David Ervine's death, Sinn Fein in Newry and Armagh, the UUP in Foyle, and much more - I wish Slugger would get a decent indexing system, it doesn't even seem to be searchable by the usual search engines at the moment.

See also sammymorse on the prospects of the dissident Republicans and 'Fair Deal' on the Unionist right, and the surge in registrations.

There were a substantial cohort of political activists in Northern Ireland whose initial burst of public activity coincided with the peace process in the mid-1990s. I was one of the least prominent (and least successful) among them; David Ervine was one of the most prominent. He is, I think, the first of that cohort to have died.

I have to get up early tomorrow morning to get the train to London, and he deserves a longer tribute than this. But I'll just record for now that I always found him congenial, sincere, and straightforward in our relatively few mutual dealings. I think the last time we met was in a TV studio before the 2003 elections, where I correctly assured him that his own Assembly seat was reasonably safe but his colleague in North Belfast might have a more difficult task.

His time, to be honest, had passed. He was unable to really engage the UVF in the decommissioning process; he was unable to keep the Loyalist electorate engaged in his political project. I had already predicted on my website that he was likely to lose his East Belfast assembly seat to the DUP in the event of elections this year, and I think that that DUP gain must now be a near-certainty.

But I would have liked to see him sit around the TV studios for the next twenty years in graceful (or graceless) retirement as a pundit, puffing on his pipe and continuing to expound mercilessly on the topic of why those who voted for the other Unionist parties were voting against their own self-interest. We won't see that now.

5) The Secret Visitors, by James White (.co.uk, .com)

This was James White's first novel, published in 1961, and like many of his others the central character is a human doctor confronted with peculiar health problems, a precursor to his best-known works, the Sector General galactic hospital series. However, it's definitely a novel of its time; the galactic federation is interested in Earth, apparently, because our planet is unique in having a) an axial tilt and b) decent scenery. Added to this, our Earthmen heroes discover that the ultra-civilised galactics have lost all knowledge of a) surgery and b) battle tactics, and are able to help them out of a tricky spot or two. But it's fun; and it's particularly fun for me because of the use of Northern Ireland (in particular Portballintrae) as a setting for much of the first half of the book - this being a reason for me to read it, as it's part of my list.

In 2006 I read over 200 books - lost count but I think the final tally was 207 - up considerably from last year's 137. This was partly because I read quite a lot of shorter books, but also I think I did more travelling where it was easy to keep reading. In addition, I had a few attempts at sertting up small reading programmes for myself, such as the Unread Books Project and pursuing a couple of obscure authors, which actually gives you an incentive to read them fairly quickly so that you can get on with the next sf paperback.

Comics

I read six graphic novels in 2006 (down from eight in 2005).

Non-fiction

I read 70 non-fiction books, about 34% of my total reading; an increase on both counts from 40 and 29% last year. ( Read more... )

Fiction

I read 131 fiction books this year, up considerably in number (but not in proportion) from 89 last year. ( Read more... )

SF

I read 101 books in the sf field this year, counting seven non-fiction books on sf topics, which is up from last year's 79 (but down in percentage terms, from almost two-thirds to less than half). ( Read more... )

Books of the Year

Non-fiction

In no particular order: Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations is a brilliant examination of what international politics is about by a senior practitioner; Lost Lives is harrowing but essential reading for anyone interested in Ireland's recent past; and Indefensible unexpectedly develops from being a day in the life of a defence lawyer to an exploration of the possibility of redemption. Honourable mentions to Fanny Kemble's first person account of slavery in the Old South, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton.

Fiction

Although I read many classics of non-genre fiction this year, the two I enjoyed most were an unpretentious children's book, The Warden's Niece by Gillian Avery, a charming children's novel set in nineteenth-century Oxford; and Ismail Kadarë's The File on H, a very thought-provoking exploration of Albania and its relations with the outside world.

SF

Only one of my top four sf books was published for the first time in 2006, and that was a compilation of the author's previous work: Impossible Stories, which pulls together Zoran Živković's visions (many previously published in Interzone) and makes a satisfying if somewhat mysterious read. I thought that Terry Pratchett hit all the right notes with Thud!, an allegory on sectarianism and bigotry - not in themselves new themes for Pratchett, but done somehow more sure-footedly here. Similarly, of the past Nebula winners, I particularly liked Elizabeth Anne Scarborough's account of the Vietnam War through a mildly fantastic lens, The Healer's War. And I can't understand why I had not previously heard much about The Wreck of The River of Stars by Michael F. Flynn, a superb hard sf story about the crew of a doomed spaceship, with characters and scenes that lingered in my mind for months after I had closed the cover.

13) The Elusive Quest: Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, by Norman Porter

Like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this was lent me by a friend and I have been feeling guilty about not reading and returning it, though in this case only for a year and a half rather than fifteen years.

I admit that I had avoided it for the wrong reasons. Porter achieved some prominence, briefly, in Northern Ireland's political discourse about ten years ago for his first book, Rethinking Unionism: An Alternative Vision for Northern Ireland (sample chapter). Since I am not a Unionist, I couldn't get very enthusiastic about his attempts to repackage it, and it seemed to me that while Porter had succeeded in producing an alternative vision which was, indeed, not too far from mine, his project was fatally flawed by insisting on calling this "Unionism" in any form; to my mind, if you aim for a decent civic society, which respects and equally guarantees the rights of all its citizens, that surely is largely irrelevant to the question of whether Northern Ireland should continue to be in the UK, join the rest of Ireland, be somehow shared or become independent (though not irrelevant as to how that issue should be resolved). So for that reason I didn't bother reading the first book, though I was well aware of its arguments.

I'm very glad to say that my friend who insisted on lending me The Elusive Quest was right to do so. Porter has moved on from Unionism, and here presents a devastating critique of both the Unionist and Republican traditions (he spends less time on more moderate Irish nationalists, though does not ignore them entirely). His refutation of the liberal pretensions of Unionism is clear and comprehensive; his attack on the ethics of both sides utterly convincing; and his dissection of the Sinn Fein/IRA attitude to the peace process, based entirely on showing the flaws in its own internal logic, is the best I've read. The book was published in 2003, before it became clear that the UUP had lost the internal battle in Unionism, so some of the commentary on Trimble is now of historical interest only; but his critiques of Unionism in general remain sound.

But this is not a negative book. Those impressive passages attacking both side (near the end) are embedded in a very positive political argument, that the key to building a healthy society is to achieve reconciliation, and that the only criterion worth using to judge the actions of politicians is the extent to which they achieve it. His case is cleverly made, with a thought-provoking matrix of theoretical background and rebuttals of potential opposing arguments. I would have liked a few more specific policy recommendations, but perhaps this is beside the point - the book is about mind-sets, rather than actions.

Inevitably, given my own interests, I've been trying to think of how Porter's arguments could be generalised to the rest of the world. I think the key message is here:

( Quote )

Communication is always necessary and appropriate, and that it is wrong, logically and morally, to assume that you already know in advance what the other side are going to say, so there is no point in talking to them. Indeed, it's a point that is true for life in general, and not just in the politics of divided societies.

Delighted to see that the Alliance Party has selected a candidate for South Belfast from outside the usual charmed circle of party activists. Back in the day, I was always hopeful that the party (indeed, that all parties) might be able to enlarge their talent pool a bit. It's good to see that a) there are people like Anna Lo willing to take the plunge and b) poltiical parties ready to encourage them.

Note the careful wording of the statement that she is the first ethnic minority candidate to stand for the Northern Ireland Assembly. There was a minor candidate in the 1982 Westminster by-election, also in South Belfast, called Jagat Narain, and the Green Party ran a couple of candidates for the 1996 Forum whose names suggest non-European background. However, she is certainly the first ethnic minority candidate to be selected for a potentially winnable seat, and almost certainly the first ethnic Chinese candidate to stand for any election in Northern Ireland.

It would be unwise to overstate the importance of the Chinese vote - the 2001 census had 4155 ethnic Chinese in the whole of Northern Ireland, of whom the 1112 in South Belfast were the largest concentration; but some of those will be under 18, and not all of them will have registered to vote. But Alliance failed to win the last seat in South Belfast by only 150 votes in 1998, and the margin between the last elected and the runner up in 2003 was even tighter. So every vote will count in March (assuming, of course, that there is an election then).

See Slugger O'Toole for the usual begrudgery.

UUP	Barr	625	+10	635	-635	0
DUP	Fielding	678	+8	686	+316	1002
Alliance	Fitzpatrick	694	+362	1056	+212	1268
SF	Leonard	253	-253	0	0	0
SDLP	Rae	219	-219	0	0	0

Total electorate 7482, total votes 2494 (34%), 25 invalid (1%), total valid 2469.

See further discussion.

The Alliance Party has won a local council by-election, in the not obviously promising district of Skerries, in Coleraine. It's the first local by-election the party has won since I was its Director of Elections ten years ago. The figures on the first count were:

Alliance 694
DUP 678
UUP 625
SF 253
SDLP 219

I don't as yet have the later figures, but obviously Alliance picked up more transfers from the Nationalist parties than the DUP managed from the UUP (some of whose votes would also have leaked to Alliance anyway). So, more sober analysis to follow; but in the meantime, congratulations to Barney Fitzpatrick and his team.

Have spent this weekend (and chunks of the last) tidying up my elections site. Not being on the ground, it's impossible to have a sense of the likely shift of votes; and opinion polls are notoriously useless. But, on the basis of the twin elections for Westminster and the local councils in 2005, I can say the following:

i) The DUP are likely to keep the three gains made by defection from the UUP after the last Assembly election (two seats in Lagan Valley and one in Fermanagh-South Tyrone); and in fact I see three further easy gains for them, in East Belfast from PUP leader David Ervine, and in North and South Belfast, from the UUP. They have outside chances of further gains from the UUP in East Londonderry and Mid Ulster, but are vulnerable to Sinn Fein in West Belfast

ii) The Alliance Party has tricky defences in Lagan Valley, South Antrim and Strangford, but I remain optimistic (indeed they ought to have a chance of picking up one of the Nationalist seats in South Belfast).

iii) The fate of independent MLA Kieran Deeny in West Tyrone is an interesting question. In 2003 he won a seat from the SDLP which in my view would otherwise have fallen to Sinn Fein. He put in a storming cross-community perfomance in the 2005 general election, though failed to win. While SF is certain to win two seats, and the Unionists another two, it's very difficult to read which two out of Deeny, the SDLP, and a third SF candidate will make it.

iv) With total certainty, I can predict that some of the above predictions are wrong.

The Doctor:...You slap the Federation in the face by sabotaging the Commission - why?
Hepesh: Because I'm afraid.
The Doctor: Afraid? Afraid of what? The Federation is your safeguard.
Hepesh: That is not true! I know the Federation's real intent!
The Doctor: The Federation's real intent is to help you.
Hepesh: No! They will exploit us for our minerals, enslave us with their machines, corrupt us with their technology... The face of Peladon will be changed, the past swept away. And everything that I know and value will have gone.
The Doctor: The progress that they offer - that we offer - isn't like that.
Hepesh: I would rather be a cave-dweller and free!
The Doctor: Free!?! With your people imprisoned by ritual and superstition?

This story, first shown in 1972, brings the Third Doctor and Jo Grant to the barbarous and wind-swept planet of Peladon, ruled by a young king (also called Peladon), which is seeking admission to a Galactic Federation including the future Earth, for whose commission delegates the Doctor and Jo are mistaken.

The story is widely seen as a reference to Britain's entry into the Common Market, now the European Union; the UK's accession treaty was signed a week before the first episode was shown. ( Thoughts on contemporary references )

( But what about the story? )

I am stunned by the attention being paid to the new opinion poll which shows Sinn Fein's support down by 4% to 20% (as El Blogador would have it, echoed by Slugger O'Toole.

I may not agree with them on much else, but the Sinn Fein supporters in the comments threads to both posts have it right; SF tend to be very much underestimated in their support in polls, not (as Blogador seems to believe) because people magically change their minds in the run-up to polling day, but because their supporters or likely supporters are shy about revealing their view to nice men or women with clipboards. I don't have any moral problem with this, actually; your views are between you and the ballot box, and pollsters have no automatic right to truthful answers.

El Blogador does raise the prospect of SF becoming so "respectable" that this effect will disappear. We've seen the process in reverse in recent years - it used to be that the Alliance Party's rating in polls was twice its election results, but now people who want to sound more moderate than they really are choose different lies to tell the pollsters. Some day SF suporters will feel thaty can be honest with the pollsters, but the fact is that their party's current poll rating is consistent with previous poll ratings for the party, and should be compared with those poll ratings rather than the last election results.

The commenters in the Slugger post make much of the 2.6% support for Republican Sinn Fein as evidence that Gerry Adams has been damaged by the St Andrew's Agreement. I doubt it; I don't think Ruairí Ó Brádaigh's lot have a visible public profile, and I would bet that at least half of the people who chose RSF in the BBC's poll thought they were indicating support for Adams as against the Stickies, rather than for Ó Brádaigh against Adams.

In summary: "Opinion poll shows SF support down 4% from last election" is simply not a news story worth reporting.

So, there is no actual deal for restoring devolved government in Northern Ireland, but there is an agreed choreography (see Guardian, BBC, and the actual agreement). Nothing very surprising, especially if you have been following the remarks of the key DUP and Sinn Fein players over the last few months. I did grin at Reg Empey's comment that the St Andrews deal is the Good Friday Agreement for slow learners - this is, of course, a riff on Seamus Mallon's line in 1998 that the Good Friday Agreement was Sunningdale for slow learners, Empey himself being one of the slow learners to whom Mallon was referring.

One aspect that is of considerable interest to me is the ambiguity of the third last step, from the timetable on page 14 of the Agreement:

March: Endorsement by the electorate of the St Andrews agreement.

Apparently the not unimportant question of whether this means new Assembly elections or a referendum was not resolved at St Andrews. And the option of elections actually has a certain ambiguity; the 18 old parliamentary constituencies, drawn up in 1995, are on the verge of being replaced by a new set, but it would be a pretty tight squeeze to force through the legislation changing the boundaries starting now (or rather, starting whenever the political decision is made to do it) in time for an election in early March. So I reckon that if there is to b