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29 January 1998 Edition

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The Master's Voice

by Meadbh Gallagher

``The Northern Ireland Secretary and a colleague there..'' said the Sky News presenter, wrapping up coverage of the joint press conference by Mo Mowlam and David Andrews in Lancaster House on Tuesday.

The Sky slip aptly sums up the significance the Irish government is accorded on the British horizon.

When Irish commentators talk of ``the two governments'' this and ``the two governments'' that, they deceive themselves if not us about the scale of that insignificance.

It need not be so, of course, and if anything has nudged the Dublin government into adopting a more assertive position towards its British counterpart it has been the peace process pushed by Sinn Féin.

It could also be argued that Dublin has rarely been in a better position from which to assert difference as strength.

But such is the softly, softly line still being taken, that to all appearances the two governments speak with one voice and on all things. And the voice that's being heard is not the Irish government's.

It's no wonder then that Bertie Ahern's soothing words at a memorial to the murder in 1972 of 14 unarmed civilians in Derry were all but ignored, even in the South.

For while strong words on Bloody Sunday must come easy, strong words on the killing of 14 unarmed catholics civilians since last March - in a period in which loyalists claimed to be on ceasefire - might come more controversially.

And while Dublin dithers, Mr David Trimble, the original cock-a-hoop, sat giggling on Tuesday as his serious sidekick, Mr Jeffrey Donaldson tore up the Framework document ``the two governments'' once claimed to have exchanged solemn vows over.

Does not all the evidence point in the same old directions again? That collusion is rife but never claimed and never challenged. That a Dublin government still chooses a policy of appeasement in the vain hope that it will persuade bullies to talk. And that London is listening to the arrogant fools who advise it that this time round, it can really finally get the croppies to lie down.

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