Turbulent year for politics

Stormont was suspended in October

BBC NI political editor Mark Devenport looks back on 2002 during which there was another suspension of the power-sharing executive against a background of allegations of an IRA spying ring and political recriminations.

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In 1994, when the IRA was planning its historic cessation of military operations, voters in California backed Proposition 184, a law which became rather better known as "three strikes and you're out".

Proposition 184 stated that if Californian criminals were found guilty of three serious felonies in a row they could end up spending the rest of their lives behind bars.

2002 could go down as the year when Irish republicans fell foul of their own "three strikes and you're out" scenario.

However, the penalty is looking less like life imprisonment and more like four or five months in suspended political animation.

The first strike took place not in 2002, but back in August 2001, when three republicans were arrested in the Colombian jungle, allegedly for helping the FARC Marxist guerrillas to develop weapons.

Raids were carried out by the police at Stormont

The arrests raised unionist hackles but did not stop the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, and the SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, securing election as first and deputy first minister in November of that year.

The new team wanted a quiet 2002 in order to prove that they could provide stable government. But that isn't what they got.

The turmoil in 2002 couldn't all be laid at the door of Irish republicans.

Loyalist paramilitaries engaged in murder and people from both communities were involved in violent clashes on Belfast's interfaces.

David Trimble threw his own personal spanner into the works in the spring when he described the Irish Republic as a "sectarian state".

But, from the point of view of the trust needed to underpin the devolved executive, the two fatal "strikes" came in March when intruders broke into a Special Branch office at the Castlereagh police station.

Arrests

Then, again in October when - a few days after the Ulster Unionists had set their own deadline for withdrawal from government - the police arrested republicans suspected of stealing or handling confidential government documents.

Strike number three included a controversial police raid on Sinn Fein's Stormont Office.

That led to the spectacle of the then health minister Bairbre de Brun shouting at police officers departing down the stairs at Parliament Buildings.

The Stormont setting might have been the same as that for last year's infamous "brawl in the hall".

Paul Murphy: Became new secretary of state in 2002

But whilst the brawl symbolised hardline unionist frustration at the survival of the power-sharing executive, the shouting match on the stairs was a harbinger of the executive's imminent demise.

Sure enough, within days, John Reid moved in to suspend the assembly and the executive.

But now - and this is where Proposition 184 does not apply - the game is to ensure that the peace process is not down and out.

Instead, there are moves to revive it by securing what are being termed, in vaguely theological language, "acts of completion" by paramilitaries.

That's jargon for some dramatic moves on disarmament and ending practices like intelligence gathering and so-called punishment beatings.

Within a fortnight of suspending the assembly, John Reid stepped aside as secretary of state to make way for Paul Murphy, who as Mo Mowlam's political development minister played a crucial role in laying the ground work for the Good Friday Agreement.

A calm and patient Welsh man, Mr Murphy's considerable reserves of diplomatic skill will be tested if there's to be a breakthrough by the government's informal target date of February or March next year.