It's a fair bet that Ian Paisley's crack about Brian Cowen's lips this week caught more attention in the Republic than Northern Ireland has for months, writes Fionnuala O'Connor.
Its peculiar nature won more notice than equally revealing events: the refusal of Gerry Adams to say that the IRA will go out of business; David Trimble's increasingly official-sounding assessments of republican shortcomings; transcripts of phone calls tapped by British security agents.
The combined effect on opinion in
the Republic is no doubt repellent. The alienation of distance and difference will surely be increased by the cancellation of elections, on top of crude invective from a man nearing 80; republicanism at its most Jesuitical, playing games with words and blaming everyone else; the Trimble instinct to plough up moral high ground as soon he reaches it; and evidence yet again of a strand in Northern and British officialdom still playing dirty tricks out of sourness about the 1998 agreement.
Yet reaction in Dublin suggested most shock at the Paisley performance, though it was wholly consistent with a lifetime's electioneering. Paisley at 77 is still a formidable vote-getter, his favourite utterance "Vote Ian Paisley Number One." The rhetoric of jibe and smear takes up considerable space in his repertoire and is much imitated. The party that dubbed David Trimble "Purple Turtle", as in "first he turns purple, then he turns turtle", has no bottom line in terms of taste, no scruple about the likelihood of increasing communal bitterness.
It may have struck some that the DUP campaign launch in the ultra-modern Odyssey complex sat ill with the Paisley "lips" name-calling: surely not the preferred image of modernising deputy leader Peter Robinson, for all that he chortled with the rest at the leader's jests. Next day Mr Robinson whisked across the outraged reaction, but by then he had also contributed his own soundbites.
The first was an unexceptionable slogan, overshadowed in the Odyssey by the lips routine: the DUP objective was "regime change" to remove Mr Trimble from leadership of unionism. But the party's first party political broadcast next morning had Mr Robinson at his most chilling, grit-under-door voice recalling for older listeners those 1986 rallies in dark streets, the beret-wearing, salute-taking Robinson. The message was unapologetic scaremongering. If Mr Trimble was not toppled, the next few years might well bring compulsory Irish in schools, amalgamation of the Garda and PSNI: slivers of accuracy inside puff-balls of paranoia.
A touch of Old Master scurrility for the most insecure unionists might fit the strategy to further reduce, if not yet eradicate, the UUP's now shaky position as leading party. For years the contrast has been glaring between UUP chaos, the spectacle of a friendless Trimble and a DUP operation that in ways resembles Sinn Féin's leadership by committee. Peter Robinson, Nigel Dodds, Gregory Campbell and a few others hammer out the line, keep election organisation simmering, think ahead, schedule speeches and articles to lay out tactics.
A series of pieces in Belfast papers, for example, spelled out the dictum of negotiations only after elections for a new agreement: the "fair deal" of this week's launch. They move crab-wise, kicking up sand for disguise.
So for the first time a Northern Ireland Office representative was invited to the party's annual conference last November, unknown to Ian Paisley. Quizzed by reporters, the leader at first said she must have gate-crashed. Other prominent figures denied knowledge publicly, but off the record an admission crept out.
The manoeuvres suggest a large family around an ageing but still tyrannical parent: adult children don't tell the old people what they don't want to hear. The will to deal that observers have always hoped Mr Robinson possesses is hinted at, never trumpeted.
But the combination of unregenerate old man and chilly technocrat with still-youthful looks and energy, on display this week to the apparent satisfaction of the party's rank-and-file, was also a reminder of how much internal massaging remains to be done before a deal emerges that can accommodate Paisleyites and republicans.
Nationalists think David Trimble has undermined his own leadership of an always tentative pro-agreement unionism, by personal ambivalence and the recurring tendency, in his increasingly prescriptive declarations of "what is required of the IRA", to sound like prime minister of a unionist government.
The charge is that he has never advocated compromise, always demeaned it. By comparison, Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson face into a major effort to supplant him, having depicted every Trimble action as treachery to Protestant Ulster.
The underlying suggestion to fundamentalist unionism nevertheless keeps optimism alive: that the DUP is the negotiating team to trust. It may seem a slender cause for hope, but for DUP audiences and DUP voters the concept of negotiation was once anathema.