The Good Friday Agreement is on life support, and it's time to switch it off

Let me be charitable to them, though. It is not entirely their fault. Both parties have seen their share of the vote grow in the past year and, together, they represent an overall majority of the votes cast. I’m pretty sure that not one single voter from the 449,658 (56%) who voted for the DUP or SF at last March’s Assembly election was voting in the hope that Arlene Foster or Michelle O’Neill would compromise, yield, bend, row back or shift their position.

And I’m also certain that, just three months later, the 531,231 voters (66%) who backed DUP and SF in the general election were encouraging Foster and O’Neill to toughen rather than soften their stance. The UUP and SDLP were punished for appearing conciliatory and Alliance more or less stood still.

We can criticise the DUP and SF as much as we like, yet the fact remains – supported by the electoral evidence – that both parties have a very clear mandate for the position they have taken.

And it’s worth noting – because it reflects the grassroots views of the supposedly ‘moderate’ UUP and SDLP – that while Robin Swann and Colum Eastwood accuse the DUP and SF of failing to cut a deal, they aren’t telling them to compromise or soften their positions.

In other words, perceived moderation is not a vote winner here. ‘Vote Mike and get Colum’ saw the UUP and SDLP take two successive hits. Arlene Foster’s ‘crocodile’ comments resulted in both the DUP and SF increasing their vote as the chasm between them deepened and widened.

And if there were an election tomorrow, Barry McElduff’s stupid and insensitive stunt with a loaf of Kingsmill on his head wouldn’t cost him his seat, let alone too many votes from his base.

Neither the DUP nor SF is appalling voters with their positions and policies. Quite the reverse, in fact – both of them are on an electoral high, with little sign of a ‘moderate’ surge persuading them to rethink and recalibrate. They do what they say on their electoral tin and increasing numbers of voters are rallying to them.

Which explains why it has been so difficult to cut a deal. Whichever one of them blinks first will take a massive hit.

The other thing that’s dawned on them –and it’s something new – is that neither of their grassroots bases actually cares if there is a rebooted Assembly and Executive anymore. Back in 1998, at the time of the Good Friday Agreement referendum, there was a palpable sense that there was a political risk to be taken, but it was a risk worth taking. In 2007, when the DUP and SF cut their own post-St Andrews deal, there was another sense of a risk to be taken and a risk worth taking.

That sense of a risk worth taking has gone. The DUP and SF don’t want to share power anymore (mind you, I’m not sure they ever did) and their voters – who represent a growing overall majority of votes cast – don’t want them to share power. They’ve had enough of trying to pretend that they can build a better Northern Ireland together. They’ve had their fill of pretending that they respect each other enough to sell the prospect that another deal will succeed where all the others have failed. Even the possibility of making local decisions on health, education, infrastructure et al isn’t enough to persuade them that it’s worth giving it all another go. The DUP base reckons that direct rule will serve them well; while SF’s base reckons that the absence of an Assembly/Executive will push London/Dublin closer together and make their Irish unity project easier to promote.

It seems to me that the Good Friday Agreement has now been tested to the point of destruction. It could only ever succeed – a point which I acknowledged during the 1998 referendum – if the key parties were able, eventually, to trust each other enough for cooperation to be, ‘genuine and credible rather than cosmetic and self-serving’.

That never happened. It is too late to expect it to happen now. And that failure, and the very clear sense that the failure was ingrained and ongoing, predates the Brexit referendum by years: indeed, I’ve been writing about it for years.

Four months away from the 20th anniversary of the GFA – and with little prospect of a genuine, credible deal to save and strengthen it – it strikes me as the moment to acknowledge that the GFA is, to all intents and purposes, dead. The beep-beep-beep noise in the background is simply the sound of the life support machine. Neither the key parties, nor the majority of voters who support them, seem unduly bothered. Even the wonderful Charles Dickens couldn’t contrive a happy ending from this mess.