I got you Babe, the radio announced last Saturday morning, yanking us off our pillows. Then came the banter between the two male voices promising an incoming political storm which might just freeze everything, writes Kevin Myers.
We knocked the radio off the bedside table before tottering through the boarding house hall, exchanging cheerful inanities with the landlady, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the Northern secretary, Paul Murphy.
We repressed the urge to scream as we hurried out through the mud and slush of small-town Ulster, and even though we'd been there before many times, we still put our foot knee-deep in an icy pool of history. Next we were accosted by that old, familiar specky-fool called reality, whom we dismissed with a supercilious wave of our all-knowing metropolitan hand. Then we staggered off towards the old, familiar Stormont field, where we waited yet again for the emergence of that furtive rodent heralding the end of winter, known as Final Settlement.
It didn't emerge. So is there any way of ending this hallucinogenic loop of Ground Hog Ulster? In another five years' time, will we be waking still to the same fatuous rhythms, the same walking nightmare from which we can't escape? And will we continue to justify our addiction to this fantasy because it is better than what preceded it, and anyone who says the loop is an unreal fantasy is Hitler? We go to such lengths to underpin this fantasy. Not so long ago on RTÉ radio, we were treated to a surreal conversation between John Hume and Tommie Gorman about what David Trimble needed to do to save the Good Friday Agreement. Yet at that very moment the poor bastard was standing powerlessly on the edge of a nationalist-hewn plank over the side of a wallowing HMS Unionism, as nationalist Ireland - once again, and as always - jeered at him for not doing more to square IRA rigging with unionist mainsails.
RTÉ was at the same old nationalist game again the other day, when Derek Davis proffered his view of the North. He talked about a loyalism which expressed loyalty in terms of the baseball bat and balaclava. He declared that that the DUP would not share power, under any circumstances, with any Catholic. Conversely, Sinn Féin could never have prospered electorally while republicans waged a "guerrilla" war, but now republicans had said the war was over, things were different.
This is Ground Hog Day stuff. Did any RTÉ news editor read it before it was broadcast as a commissioned item? The DUP, the largest party in Northern Ireland, is certainly not now a party of the baseball bat and the balaclava; indeed, it vehemently opposed the release even of loyalist terrorists.
And far from the DUP not sharing power with Catholics under any circumstances, it actually did share power with Catholics in the last Executive, with both the SDLP and Sinn Féin - inluding that splendid education supremo Martin McGuinness, who in the past 30 years has done wonders for the education of the young people of the Bogside and the Creggan. The DUP certainly didn't talk to or work with Sinn Féin, but it worked alongside it, and most definitely shared power with it.
Moreover, in the emerging revision of history, is it now RTÉ-speak to refer to the IRA war as a guerrilla war? If that's the case, were the Shankill Butchers guerrillas too? And those fine lads in the UDA "Romper Rooms"? And what about the gangs of loyalist thugs with their balaclavas and their baseball hats - the chaps referred to by Derek Davis as somehow representative of the loyalist opposition to the Good Friday Agreement - are these guerrillas as well? As for the final point of the Davis thesis, the IRA has not said that the war is over: NOT, NOT, NOT. The IRA uses words with care, meticulously picking them for their malleability - as for example, the ceasefire term "complete cessation of military operations" in 1994, which enabled that Socrates of the Foyle, Martin McGuinness, to interpret "complete" as meaning "over". Then we got Canary Wharf, by which linguistic liberation we learnt that "complete cessation" can even mean "complete resumption". Is journalistic language to go the way of the limbo-lingo of the Belfast Agreement, an argot drawn from benign hallucination and a wondrously plastic vocabulary?
In this linguistic world, international commitments mean only what they seem according to the needs of the particular moment, and never again afterwards. The only thing that is concrete in such arrangements is the underground bunkers in which the IRA has hidden its guns.
Meanwhile, nationalist Ireland continues its northern dance to the tune of the Sinn Féin piper, aided and abetted by the Government, even as the SDLP wallflower turns into dried petals in a history book. Thus we had the enormously enjoyable spectacle of General de Chastelain telling the Irish and British governments - and therefore their intelligence services - Garda Special Branch, Army Intelligence, MI5, MI6, British Joint Intelligence, CIA, and very probably Lance-Corporal Ernie Bloggs (Royal Corps of Potato Peelers) - about the two Brown Besses the IRA had recently surrendered.
But the unfortunate people who had to approve the arms surrender, the electorate of Northern Ireland, were kept totally in the dark. They - as we - know that dark well. It is the one which one inhabits just before one wakes up, only to hear Sinn Féin whispering, yet again: I got you Babe.