Ian Paisley stands with Martin McGuinness to welcome a government he once deemed hostile, writes Dan Keenan.
"The Ice Age is over," said the Rev Ian Paisley, a beaming and immaculately suited Martin McGuinness by his side. The First Minister recalled a time when he threw snowballs at a taoiseach for daring to tread Stormont soil and to meet a unionist prime minister committed to "hands across the Border".
Yesterday, in Armagh, he again stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Mr McGuinness, a man he once shunned, to welcome a government once deemed hostile in a cross-Border forum he once boycotted claiming it was a quasi all-Ireland government-in-waiting. Consistency, as they say, is indeed over-rated.
In the latest of a seemingly unending stream of great leaps forward, breakthroughs and new eras, Dr Paisley then pronounced himself happy to be back in the cathedral city of his birth and pledged to work for mutual co-operation, good neighbourliness and prosperity on an island-wide basis.
"This is new territory," he said. "I hope it will be very successful. I hope that some announcements will be made today to show that we mean business." Banishing the talk of former days of hostile interference and cross-Border meddling, he said everyone had moved on from the days of mutual competition to co-operation.
"We want both parts of Ireland to prosper," he said. Asked if there would be Irish Government support for the Northern case for lower corporation tax in line with the Republic, he said emphatically there already was. And for a moment it sounded as if it was a case of Belfast and Dublin in league against the British government.
The bulk of the Cabinet arrived - by coach this time, clearly anxious not to repeat the motorcade of State cars that so rattled unionist sensitivities the last time the North South Ministerial Council met in Armagh back in the edgy days before the long five years of suspension. Brian Cowen resisted press appeals to step up to the microphone, explaining instead that "the premier league" was following shortly and he wouldn't want to steal any of the boss's thunder. He of course is merely the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern didn't feel so constrained and took the opportunity to strike the note of realpolitik, which seems to form the foundation of the North-South machinery. He was merely glad to be talking of the new Dublin-Belfast motorway extension, the banishing of mobile phone roaming charges, grand tourism projects and the sensible pragmatism of the National Development Plan. The Doc later explained himself and his apparent change of heart. It was the St Andrews Agreement, he said, which allowed unionists to decide whom to send to meetings such as these. Decisions were taken by the two parliaments on both sides of the Border - all of which is fine by him.
The miracle of it all wasn't the role played by unionists, not when you have the Sinn Féin president inviting PSNI chief constable Hugh Orde to Ballymurphy to work out ways of fighting local crime, he pointed out.
That indeed was the "miracle".