Fragile relationships on the Hill of the O'Neill

The backdrop for recent Stormont briefings has certainly changed but have the relationships?

You can see why Sinn Féin like holding the post-executive news conferences on the Hill of the O'Neill. As names go they couldn't make it up.

Mind you Arlene Foster seems equally at home with the arrangement.

The decision to take the weekly showpieces off the hill at Stormont on to a hill above Dungannon, County Tyrone, seems popular with everyone in the two biggest parties at least, and appears to have coincided with an uplift in the always-brittle relationship.

OK, there's been some criticism that it involves unnecessary travel when they should have been setting an example.

And it probably wasn't clever to use the first event to attack employers making staff travel unnecessarily to their workplace. Pot-kettle-black and all that.

'The Hill of Arlene and Michelle'

But since the executive now meets virtually it's worth saying the venue is about 10 minutes from Michelle O'Neill's home and 40 minutes from Arlene Foster's, though she's keen to point out it's in her constituency.

Although 40 minutes from her house, the Hill of O'Neill is in Arlene Foster's constituency

When someone jokingly suggested they rename it the "Hill of Michelle and Arlene", she's said to have replied "surely you mean the Hill of Arlene and Michelle".

Fittingly this was the ancient capital of Ulster.

From there, the O'Neill family ruled for more than 300 years. Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, was said to have had a "complicated" relationship with the English monarchy.

There were battles, and Dungannon Castle was burned many times before the exodus of O'Neill and others in what became known as the Flight of the Earls.

In more recent times, it was a security force base used by both the Army and police until peace allowed its return to Dungannon Council in 2007, whereupon it was turned into a shiny new arts centre.

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And now peace - or something akin to it - once again seems to have settled on the space between the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin after a particularly rocky patch before Christmas.

The DUP's decision to use the cross community vote to veto more lockdown restrictions threatened the fragile relationship.

Arlene Foster's well-practised new cool disappeared spectacularly in a virtual news conference after a North-South Ministerial Council meeting in December when she attacked Sinn Féin and scolded a journalist from the Republic for referring to "the Six Counties".

But diplomacy now appears the watchword. A further month of restrictions was agreed last week without a whimper.

The Sinn Féin leadership said the use of military personnel in hospitals should not be an orange and green issue

And at the news conference on the Hill of the O'Neill she gave a measured response after being asked about a Sinn Féin assembly member making derogatory remarks about the decision to deploy 100 military personnel in our hospitals to help with Covid-19 pressures.

In turn, Sinn Féin, at leadership level, decided not to make anything of that highly-sensitive move saying it should not be an orange and green issue.

This week's row over a republican funeral in Derry, with more apparent breaches of the Covid-19 regulations, is another illustration of how fragile this detente can be.

"Two or three" Sinn Fein councillors paid their respects from the roadside, said Gerry Kelly.

But by then a senior DUP source had acknowledged there was very little the party could do, short of walking out of government "and you're not going to collapse the executive during a pandemic", he said resignedly.

And so, imperfect as it is, Stormont ploughs on. The parties know that bickering through the darkest days of a pandemic would not be a good look.

'Pretty hairy'

Even before the latest funeral row, an executive insider said relations between Sinn Féin and the DUP were still "not brilliant".

"I would say it's probably better than before Christmas but that was a pretty low bar," they added.

"They're doing ok on most stuff but then it doesn't take a lot to tip it over into sniping. The transfer test saga was pretty hairy."

The temperature may have dropped but the reception seems less frosty

Of course, the transfer test is one of many issues on which the DUP and Sinn Féin are ideologically miles apart.

The decision of AQE to pull the plug on the tests for this year prevented another executive split, even though Sinn Féin had already made it clear it would not threaten devolution.

On a good day you can see seven counties, including Louth, from the Hill of the O'Neill.

But as we saw once again this week, a shared vision isn't often a mark of the Stormont Executive.