After the perils of Pauline, the triumphs of Trimble. And with yet another bound, our unlikely hero is free, until the next time. The peace process is saved: mainland Britain switches its attention over to England against Brazil: Peter Mandelson prepares to concentrate on the next election campaign. A crisis averted becomes inside page news for yesterday's papers. This is politics as usual, which disguises the fact that there is nothing usual about Northern Irish politics. What, for instance, would any normal party leader do if his deputy drifted off to Taiwan for the vital days of decision-forming? What would Blair do to Prescott? He would drop big John into oblivion from a great height, not greet him home and fete him as some mighty prophet. Yet John Taylor, preened with self-importance, is hailed merely because he agrees to support his boss.  You don't have to be loyal to be a loyalist. Jeffrey Donaldson and the rejectionists, playing to a bizarre audience of 860 grandees, won't give up. Paisley's DUP will probably stalk away from the reconvened assembly and rail outside the walls. Even without the IRA's dumps of mystic verbiage, words put beyond use where Cyril Ramaphosa keeps his dictionary, the scope for trouble remains almost infinite.  It is painfully easy, amid such confusion, just to recite the word "process" as some kind of mantra and to forget what it means. Pause,   though. What is this peace process? It is a formula for reconciliation and quiet on the streets. It puts London and Dublin in a settled context. It persuades once mortal enemies to sit side by side as ministerial colleagues, deciding about jobs and schools and hospitals. By this transference of power, too, it seeks to make Ulster politics real at last, freed from a time warp of rhetoric and opposition posturings: the most necessary devolution of the lot.  But here there are other connections. Real politics also means winning and losing elections. It means change to the pulse of democracy - the eventual boot for Blair, the rise of the pensioner's friend. It involves ebb and flow.  We know that already from the matching devolutions of the last three years. Alun Michael has ebbed for ever. Donald Dewar may soon be gone with the flow. If you give voters assemblies and executives to elect, the voters become sovereign. You may make it difficult for them by installing the drag anchors of proportional representation: Scotland and Wales have those. They're stuck, by design, with coalition administrations.  They, though, can change the weighting of those coalitions and the faces who front them. One fine day, there'll be a Scots Nat chief minister in Edinburgh. One predictable day, Labour will be cut out of the Cardiff action. The question for Belfast, the hole in the heart of this process, is where the reality of politics bites there.   Let's assume that the assembly is back in business, stronger than before because of the worsting of Donaldson and the guarantees of the IRA. Trimble and his other (useful) deputy, Seamus Mallon, resume work: Martin McGuinness is more interested in A level results than Armalite stocks.  That, crucially, is the first base camp of reconciliation. Everybody who stood for election and still wants to play has a guaranteed part of the action. Badmouthing the British government doesn't stop the leaks in school roofs or improve ambulance response times. The focus inevitably shifts to practical policies and their delivery. Who cares about the Battle of the Boyne when there are jobs wanted now?  Getting there: got that. You could tell, even from the first few weeks of assembly life, how power and accountability can alter perspectives. (It's the old Yasser Arafat test: make him responsible for clean tap water and electrical supplies and he is seen in a different light.) The practical politicisation of politicians is the underpinning of peace.  But how, thereafter, does Northern Ireland move on the next camp, to the stage   where leaking school roofs or job losses bring electoral retribution? The difficulty with the Good Friday agreement is that it doesn't know: it never envisages a Bad Saturday. Our old chum d'Hondt, with his mathematical system to share out the fruits of proportional representation, operates relentlessly.  The assembly, monitored by equality commissioners, has inclusion engraved on its founding statutes. If you're one of the chosen 108, you have a stake: you have to register as a nationalist or a unionist or something other and your vote matters, by parallel consent or weighted majority, in the choice of every committee, every chairman, every minister.   It seems an odd question to put, but where is the opposition in such a controlled, infinitely balanced arena? Answer: except for Paisley, stomping on the lawn outside, there won't be an opposition that matters. The big boys within the walls are yoked together for all Good Fridays.  We ought to be clear that that fix, however essential it currently seems, is also a terrible snare. It freezes the religious divides and histories in another time warp. It makes party labels the key to power and seals them in their own little boxes. It purposely delays the moment when the Unionists or Sinn Fein or the SDLP will look out from their own sectarian audiences and begin to match their policies to the orientations of London or of Dublin. In short, to practise the real politics   which can free Northern Ireland from its infernal cocoon.  I want to see Sinn Fein's policy bag emptied on to the floor for wider inspection so that I can see how its old collection of sub-Marxist nostrums is changing (just as the ANC in South Africa has changed). I want to hear about hospital waiting lists and bobbies on the beat. I want to see David Trimble and Gerry Adams locked in debate about gay rights. I want a relevance which doesn't end at the ferry terminal. I would even (ye gods!) love a good row over the euro.  The latest wobbly triumph of Trimble is a million miles from such mundane joys. It is still locked in its own, claustrophobic cage, still absorbed with the symbolism of flags and guns fallen silent but not destroyed: the whether, not the how. In mainland Britain, we have handed in all our guns, because that is the law. In Belfast, the legacy of Dunblane doesn't count. The debate remains wholly internalised.  Devolution, within the United Kingdom, means finding a different kind of balance. It means finding a matching political system that fits. It means the political ability to talk about the same things in the same tone of voice and to exact the same kind of electoral punishment in failure. That is the only real culmination of what we glibly call the "peace process". A new rhythm and new beginning which one distant day may be called normality.  <BR>Peter Preston