A deal might be cobbled together, but it would be flimsy and wouldn't last

In the past few weeks, since the last talks folded in November, I tend to be asked the same three questions.

Do you really believe that the Good Friday Agreement is, as you wrote in a recent column, ‘to all intents and purposes dead’? Do you think another round of talks will end in a breakthrough and a deal they can all stand over? Do you think there is a formula for as ‘close to a successful deal as we’re ever going to get’? Let me take those in order.

Underpinning the enthusiasm for the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was the hope that if old enemies found themselves around an Executive table they might – just might – find a new way of doing business.

No one expected unionists and republicans to abandon fixed positions on the constitution; and no one argued that issues like legacy, reconciliation and ‘truth’ would be resolved easily or quickly.

My own view at the time was that the risks were worth taking. Both sides needed to test each other. We had to see if it was possible for post-conflict vehicles and voices to emerge. We had to discover if there was a chance – even the smallest – of being able to surprise ourselves and cooperate.

Those unionists in the mid-1990s who attacked David Trimble for ‘rolling over’ had never been able to persuade successive governments of the merits of their own agenda. Robert McCartney’s United Kingdom Unionist Party came and went, splitting and squabbling along the way. The DUP, having promised to destroy the GFA, simply implemented it. Jim Allister has not been able to attract the numbers to present a serious political/electoral challenge to either the DUP or UUP. The hard reality is that no one within unionism has produced a credible alternative they have been able to sell to either the unionist electorate or the British government.

What is clear is that the hope of 1998 has been ground to dust. Unionism and nationalism has, for the most part, consolidated around the DUP and SF. The new voices and vehicles didn’t gain traction. While it may not be true that the DUP and SF support bases hate each other, there’s very little evidence that they want to cut a deal that brings them closer together.

Ironically, we’re further apart now than we were 20 years ago. The middle ground hasn’t grown. There’s no new thinking: and I don’t buy the argument that a generational shift on same-sex marriage and abortion reform means that ‘important political change is happening in the undergrowth’. It isn’t. And without the hope and enthusiasm which fuelled it in 1998 the GFA has no purpose.

Do I think it’s likely that the latest round of talks can deliver a deal they can all stand over? Nope. There are a number of reasons for that conclusion, the primary one being that you can’t build something solid from a GFA framework which is now so rickety.

Working together requires consensus, commitment and the same route map. The two main parties don’t have that: and nor do the three smaller ones.

On issues like a stand-alone Irish language act and Brexit, for example, the differences between Long, Eastwood and Swann are just as polarising as those between Foster and O’Neill: so it’s nonsense to believe that ‘letting the smaller parties get on with it’ is a credible solution. The fact that neither the SDLP nor UUP gained any votes from the clearly very good relationship between Eastwood and Nesbitt last March tells you all you need to know.

Is there a formula for an ‘it’s as close to a successful deal as we’re ever going to get’ outcome? There is actually quite a lot of stuff that the DUP/SF could sign off tomorrow. Most of it dates back to the Programme for Government (PfG) in May 2016 and which Foster and McGuinness stood over in their joint article in November 2016. The financial stuff would have to be revisited; yet, broadly speaking, most of it could be lifted and pasted into a new PfG tomorrow.

There are a number of other areas in which compromise between them seems, on the surface, to be possible. Some of that centres on reform of the petition of concern – which all five parties now accept as necessary. Could the DUP sell that, particularly if it meant losing votes on same-sex marriage and abortion? Probably. But they couldn’t sell that and a stand-alone Irish language act.

There are some issues – and the Irish language act and the DUP’s ‘alleged’ failure to implement previous deals are the most prominent – in which compromise seems extraordinarily unlikely.

So what the two parties have to do is decide whether direct rule (which has never really been a friend of either unionism or republicanism) is preferable to what they had between 2007 and 2016. But that, of course, raises the crucial question of whether they actually do want to work together anymore: and want it enough to agree the compromises they’ve rejected for a year?

My overall assessment remains relentlessly gloomy. We are still trying to pretend the GFA has a purpose in terms of reconciliation and progress here. It doesn’t. A deal, of sorts, is certainly possible in next few weeks; but it won’t have either substance or durability.