Demoralised prods: what benefits?

Richard Kelly visited the PUP office in Stormont.

"'All Prods are clairvoyant, you know,' Ervine said. 'And it's never good news.' If David Ervine was now playing Cassandra, then the peace process was sickly indeed. After all, the PUP were the sole unionist grouping which wholeheartedly championed the Agreement-indeed, the first unionists in living memory to come up with a new idea, namely that working-class Protestants and Catholics should make common cause to challenge the long misgovernment of middle-class, 'big house' unionism."

As for the much heralded benefits of locally based government:

"'You can sell large positives,' Ervine admitted, 'but the difficulty of living in a divided society where there's a lack of trust is that small negatives can overshadow large positives. So you get Paisley huffing and puffing and then Sinn Fein giving the impression to the unionist community that Paisley's got it right - demanding benefits but only for themselves, sending out the mood music that nationalists will never be comfortable, never be satisfied, never be reasonable.'"

Previously talking down victory.