However, those are difficult positions to defend in public. Instead unionists, both in media interviews and in the assembly, have chosen to make their main objection Haass’s failure to mention terrorism. They contend that, absent that word, the document betrays victims of the Troubles. This position is entirely spurious and intellectually dishonest and, more to the point, as Haass has said, actually lets down the very victims they are pretending to defend because,  thanks to Unionist intransigence and sheer bloody-mindedness,  victims will receive nothing. In the section of his document dealing with the past Haass had this to say. “What happened in the past cannot be changed. We cannot yet agree on the causes of the conflict, a mutual understanding of those events or even at times the terminology to describe them. “Some see its protagonists in stark black and white – hero or villain, freedom fighter or terrorist. Still others reject such labels entirely.” Pretty obvious you might think. Stands to reason, eh? Not to unionists it seems. Demonstrating once again their traditional inability to compromise and unwillingness to negotiate, Unionists are insisting that only their version of the past is accepted. It was all the fault of the IRA (and maybe Irish governments). No blame attaches to Unionists, British governments, or the military wing of unionism, the RUC and UDR. This was, altogether now, ‘a great wee place’, until the civil rights movement – “a United Ireland movement” Paisley tells us, an IRA front, upset the applecart. As one unionist leader in an incredibly stupid puerile remark told Gerry Kelly on TV, “there are not different narratives, only facts”. Really?

Unionists want the definition of victim redefined. Jeffrey Donaldson has been trying to push a bill through Westminster to undo the definition agreed after the Good Friday Agreement. Needless to say it would exclude anyone connected with the Republican Movement. Others want the 2000 Terrorism Act to apply to events in the Troubles even though the practice is that you can’t use an act against people retrospectively. You can’t convict someone of an offence that wasn’t an offence at the time it was carried out. You can’t turn someone into a terrorist using a definition of terrorism introduced years after the event. No matter. Many unionists are so blinded by bitterness and bile they will pursue their exercise in stupidity in a race to the bottom of the well competing with flag wavers, serial protesters, sectarian marchers. What this idiotic approach will guarantee, as Haass has warned, is that time will run out. People who were actors in the Troubles will die, memories will fade, evidence will be lost and it will prove impossible to recover any narrative, or even many ‘facts’ of the Troubles to explain to people who suffered loss. Furthermore, people who have suffered loss themselves will die never having found out what happened to relatives.

Thus talk of failing the victims by signing up to Haass’s proposals is supreme hypocrisy. On the contrary, failing to sign up to Haass is a self-indulgent political luxury which of its very nature fails the victims. Most despicable of all, it’s designed to act as cover for the real reason Unionists won’t sign up to Haass and that is a refusal to accept the rule of law applying to flags, emblems and parades, the last visible vestiges of Unionism’s resistance to the concept of living on equal terms with the rest of the people on this island.

Still, it’s always good to have unionist intransigence exposed to the public gaze and ratified by an impartial outsider. No wonder Haass laughed out loud at the prospect of ever coming back to Belfast to have another go.