To this impasse, the leaders of three nations, with all the ingenuity and expertise at their disposal, have been unable to find a solution. And that is the nub of it. The closer an Ulster executive comes, the more implausible it seems that its leading members could ever work together. The answer is that we do not know, because their political careers are based entirely on sectarian positioning. They have never taken a decision about a school, a hospital, a social security benefit, even a bus shelter.
Journalists hang upon their every cough and facial twitch.
Let their brows darken or their voices harden for an instant and prime ministers, presidents, secretaries of state and US senators drop everything and converge upon them, like anxious parents ready to soothe an exceptionally fragile infant. If ever the power-sharing executive does get under way, be sure that, at regular intervals, it will be deemed in imminent danger of collapse. Otherwise, the likes of Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness would be nothing more than minor ministers of an obscure, offshore European province, no more worthy of notice than the Bavarian minister of agriculture or the tourism minister of a Swiss canton. The habit of living in the international limelight, once begun, is hard to break. The danger of the peace process has always been that, far from healing sectarian divisions, it entrenches them.