The Virtual Peace Process

Belfast witnessed yet another bizarre spectacle yesterday. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and British PM Tony Blair held a news conference to announce ... well, to announce nothing, but to reveal what they would have said, and others would have said, had the negotiations which they had been brokering been successful; maybe we should call it a meta peace process. But with the substance, or lack thereof, of the event being analysed elsewhere, we have a few observations based on the TV coverage we saw last night. Why was Bertie wearing an overcoat indoors? Although he did seem to have taken it off by the time the news conference began.

We also had to laugh at one moment in the later Sinn Fein news conference (in which they explained what they had agreed to in the meta process); Gerry Adams' reference to "that organisation" (meaning the IRA) sounded exactly like Bill Clinton's reference to "that woman" all those years ago. But finally, Bertie was at it again with the sunny sartorial choices. Who amongst us doesn't remember his yellow trousers at the G8 summit? Today it was a cheery tie, we couldn't tell quite what colour on our dodgy 15 inch TV, but could it possibly have been the colour du jour, orange?