The question of how soon and for what considerations Sinn Féin will decide to back the Police Service of Northern Ireland rumbles on, the timetable dependent on their own internal development and British political judgment.
How the PSNI performs in the meantime is bound to affect the outcome. Any idea that with the IRA at least avowedly in retirement, police might focus more effectively on loyalists has been shaken by events.
The cry for normal policing has become acute very quickly. All it took was a grim sequence of violence on top of the age-old backbeat of the marching season: a 15-year-old boy knifed to death in north Belfast, a 15-year-old girl raped in west Belfast, continuing attacks on Catholic families and property in Protestant towns.
Like Sinn Féin, the PSNI seems to be struggling - perhaps with its evolution from paramilitary force to civilian police service as much as past identification with one community only. Lack of police imagination may be as ominous as lack of trust in republicans.
After last weekend's brutal rape, a Sinn Féin representative could not bring himself to urge anybody with information to go to the police. They did it anyhow. But the PSNI made one of several slips by failing to get back to a couple of useful-sounding informants. A senior officer's response to the criticism that followed sounded remarkably like the stonewalling that met all complaint during the Troubles.
The ludicrous scenes in Garnerville, close to the police training college, are only weeks old. When police stood by in a small Protestant estate while hundreds of UVF-supporting youths milled about for most a day and evening to ensure that LVF families left, the best mitigation on offer was that the evictions were popular and no obvious crimes were being committed. What many Catholics and some Protestants saw seemed a less firm approach with milling loyalists than police tend to show in any similar situation involving republicans.
Their handling of loyalists in Co Antrim this week made things worse. There they briefed journalists that efforts to drive the dozen or so Catholic families out of Protestant Ahoghill, near Ballymena, and attacks on Ballymena's Catholic churches were "linked to tensions over a republican parade", the first in the town. There was no doubt local loyalists were angry about the parade, but attacks on outnumbered Co Antrim Catholics are as old as the hills.
When police told Ahoghill residents they had received a taped threat of more attacks and handed out fire blankets and fire extinguishers, it did nothing to instil confidence in a new resolution to "put the bigots out of business". The derision that it invited was only outweighed by the mockery that met Sinn Féin's condemnation of the gunmen who told a taxi-driver to take a bomb to Lurgan police station. Republicans forgive themselves everything.
Others will never forget Patsy Gillespie, the Derryman the IRA turned into a human bomb by detonating explosives in the van they forced him to drive to an army base by holding his family at gunpoint.
The Ballymena church at Harryville is closed for the summer, the nearby parochial house empty, a move its priest and congregation made after several years of sharp harassment, the most dramatic being an 18-month gauntlet Massgoers ran each Sunday of picketers shouting abuse and singing sectarian songs - never once broken up by a forceful police "Move along there". The strongest defence ever offered of the limp policing at Harryville was that concerted arrests and prosecutions were discouraged by prominent Catholics who feared they would accelerate loyalist harassment, not deter it.
Long used to being a disregarded minority in the centre of Ian Paisley's constituency, the Ballymena Catholics of the 21st century are divided, and far from organised. Some dislike the Harryville tactics: loud and consistent exposure of aggression, they think, might be more respected than passivity.
The belated arrival of hardline local republicanism, keen to parade at the precise moment that Sinn Féin there and elsewhere would prefer to organise festivals, may have missed its moment. But it is not a surprise. Nor is the absence from the DUP leader of one of his still-thunderous denunciations in the direction of loyalists attacking Catholics.
Criticism of ambivalence or less than forthright condemnation of loyalist violence by unionist politicians is more useful and effective from inside their own community. From nationalists or Catholics of any hue it only brings angry denial. So it mattered that a young Ballymena Presbyterian cleric said Protestants had "stood back for too long and let this happen", and that the Belfast Telegraph led its front page yesterday with "Paisley silent on attacks - DUP leader 'on vacation' as campaign of terror escalates in the heart of his own constituency". A party spokesman told the Telegraph that Dr Paisley was "now on his way to vacation" and "would not be in a position to issue a press statement at this stage".