If Paisley means what he says, and cannot be led to a more moderate position, then Blair and Ahern hardly need to travel to Stormont today, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
Tony Blair might have hit on a terrible truth. To adapt a well-worn phrase, from Ian Paisley's perspective it would seem "the process itself is the problem, stupid".
Since April 1998 the British prime minister and his aides have cited the Belfast Agreement as "the template" for conflict resolution around the world. In a recent speech in Washington Mr Blair slightly adjusted this line, suggesting (rather optimistically, in the view of some listening) that resolving the problems of the Middle East should actually prove easier than settling Northern Ireland. Why? Because "in the case of Israel and Palestine we do now have agreement about the basic nature of the settlement - two states".
In contrast, Mr Blair explained: "The problem we have had in Northern Ireland is that there has never been agreement on the basic nature of the final outcome, one part wanting union with the United Kingdom, the other with the Republic of Ireland."
This is hardly revelatory to students of the peace process, although it is probably the first time Mr Blair has acknowledged the problem. And as they descend on Stormont this morning, a key question for Mr Blair and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is whether, in Dr Paisley's DUP, they have a unionist leadership willing to help them resolve the problem or, perhaps more accurately, to live with it.
For many the genius of the Belfast Agreement was not that it resolved the North's "constitutional issue" but that it could henceforth be dealt with - indeed fought over - in a purely political context without further recourse to violence.
David (now Lord) Trimble knew this, though calculating republicans would gradually be sucked in to a "partitionist" administration buttressing the status quo. To his many republican and nationalist critics Trimble was simply in denial about an agreement which patently never required republicans to become unionists - promising them rather "parity of esteem" in an already semi-detached part of the United Kingdom while specifically denying him symbolic victory on issues such as flags, emblems and "royal" titles for the police which would prove so corrosive of his electoral base.
Chief UUP dissident, now DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson, on the other hand, appeared in a recent television documentary to allow that Trimble had got things right on the constitutional issues - the principle of consent, and the withdrawal of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution - only to fall down on what Mr Donaldson considered the essential issues of RUC reform and IRA decommissioning. However, Mr Donaldson was obviously not the draftsman of the then-rival DUP's assessment of the agreement. And underpinning that DUP critique was the relentless charge that Trimble had put Unionist Ulster on the Dublin road.
Some of Trimble's closest aides certainly thought him ultimately undone as much as anything by Sinn Féin's constant assertion that the agreement provided for transition to inevitable Irish unity. At his strongest, Mr Trimble only ever persuaded about half the unionist population to the contrary. As the tide turned against him, even many of them reverted to their first instinct, which was to believe Gerry Adams - and of course they were encouraged to do so by the DUP.
In turn the DUP triumphed on the promise to end the days of "pushover unionism" and halt what they, like Sinn Féin, depicted as a process with but one possible destination.
After the Donaldson defection presaging the UUP's electoral wipeout in last year's general election, that might have been that - and indeed many had voted for the DUP trusting and believing it so. Yet the two governments calculated differently, believing the assumption of the unionist leadership would ultimately force the DUP on to the same "centre ground" and into "compromise" mode.
Indeed some key British and Irish officials rationalised that the UUP's eclipse had been inevitable all along, that the logic of the process required the arrival of a Paisley party incapable of being outflanked on the right and thus able to make a deal that would stick.
In this they were encouraged by the enthusiasm with which the DUP's "modernising" wing joined the negotiations about the failed "Comprehensive Agreement" in autumn 2004. Notwithstanding the SDLP's reservations, and the DUP's protestations, Taoiseach Ahern and Mr Blair declared themselves satisfied this draft agreement was true to the fundamental architecture of the Good Friday accord. As in the fated Trimble/Adams negotiation in Autumn 2003, it envisaged a resolution of the policing issue some years down the line in the context of the eventual devolution of policing and justice powers to Stormont.
And it offered no obvious solution to the "process-versus-settlement" argument with which the DUP had successfully tormented Trimble.
Revisiting this terrain, it is certainly possible to understand the Taoiseach's suggestion earlier this year that re-establishing a power-sharing Executive at Stormont might involve some "10 hours'" work rather than six months of Peter Hain's pointless Assembly.
And if the DUP really was where it was perceived to be back in 2004, then we might also understand such dogged optimism as still exists that this year's November 24th deadline might be met.
However, there is some evidence that the perception was always wrong; that, whatever they thought, the DUP modernisers were never in control of that situation; and that Dr Paisley conducted that negotiation with a clear eye on the eventual "blame game", knowing there was no possibility of a deal being concluded on a photographic record of IRA decommissioning.
This may be left a matter for dispute among the DUP's leading lights. What can hardly be denied is that - post the Northern Bank robbery in particular - Dr Paisley has further raised the bar to a power-sharing deal. And in addition to stipulating Sinn Féin support for the PSNI as a prior requirement for entering a devolved government, the DUP leader used his recent Irish Times interview to insist: "But that government must not be an interim government. They cannot tell me I must take a step but it's only a step to another step . . . I mean Adams made that clear, that we're on a progress [ to a united Ireland]. That progress is not going to descend on this Assembly."
If Dr Paisley thinks to deny republicans a process, it is not at all clear where he hopes to place unionism in the context of an Anglo-Irish relationship threatening joint stewardship in the absence of devolution. But unless he's bluffing - or there are grounds for believing his more moderate colleagues can lead him to another position - it would seem Mr Blair and Mr Ahern need hardly travel to Stormont, never mind wait until November, for their answer.