Fionnuala O Connor

NATIONALISTS across the board, including much of mainstream republicanism, have had doubts and misgivings from the start about the Stormont structures. Misgiving of late has far outweighed optimism. But by and large the nationalist world has wanted the arrangement to work, for want of better and as a means to an end of the Troubles, the slow evolution of a properly-shared Northern Ireland. The most lasting problem, from the start, has not been IRA guns under the table, nor an IRA structure that became a freeze-dried husk, in the words this week of the most anti-republican Dublin minister[...]