Secrets in Stormont Confidential

By Mark Devenport BBC Northern Ireland political editor

Confidentiality has been on the Stormont agenda in a couple of different ways during the past week.

Sinn Fein believe they have been burned by the DUP in private contacts leading up to their extraordinary ard fheis on policing.

Committee reports may not be seen by the public

Republicans say they agreed to three changes to their motion to the party conference but didn't get the response the DUP had promised.

The DUP say they made no such commitment.

Annoyed by what they claim is bad faith, Sinn Fein has been dangling the existence of an "independent channel" with the DUP under the noses of the media.

At Stormont, Gerry Adams talked in a degree of detail about this channel without explicitly "outing" the go-between.

This isn't the first time it's been rumoured that the DUP has circumvented its "no dialogue with Sinn Fein" rule.

Just as they have done before, the DUP denounced the Sinn Fein version as lies.

Does Sinn Fein's partial exposure of the "independent channel" point to a lack of seriousness about doing a deal?

Secret reports

Or is it simply fair retribution for a broken understanding?

If Gerry Adams' claims are fictional why did the supposed DUP response he produced bear such a marked similarity to a paragraph which appeared in an article by Tony Blair representing Downing Street's view of DUP policy?

Confidentiality of a different kind has been under discussion at the Stormont Programme for Government Committee.

Ian Paisley has said the DUP has given no timeframe commitment

Last summer the committee's precursor, the Preparation for Government Committee, set an interesting example in open government.

After a BBC leak of one of its hearings, the committee decided to publish transcripts of its proceedings.

When the committee issued reports they were published and debated in the assembly chamber.

However, when the committee morphed into its current form (including representatives of the four main parties but minus the Alliance) this openness quickly evaporated.

No transcripts of hearings were issued. Six sub-groups were set up to consider key issues such as policing and justice, rates and water charges and school admissions.

But now it's emerged that many of the sub-groups' reports may never see the light of day.

The recommendations of the sub-group dealing with the decentralisation of public sector jobs are expected to be made public when the issue is debated next Tuesday.

But the Programme for Government Committee believes the "default position" should be that other reports are not published unless a strong case is made to the contrary.

A Stormont source told me that the sub-groups were meant to be informing a future executive, not the general public.

Informative

Publishing a report on the economy, for instance, could simply give away the parties' negotiating position with the Treasury over a future peace dividend.

However, some lobbyists who gave evidence to the sub-groups are not convinced.

They want the reports made public and debated in the assembly before it dissolves for an election campaign.

That way, they say, voters will be better informed about where the politicians stand on crunch issues.

It may be that the sub-group reports would not, even if they were published, be terribly informative - one source described them as "lowest common denominator" documents.

But unless the committee changes its default position the rest of us will never know.

Another Stormont source claimed that three of the parties, Sinn Fein, the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists, were keen to see the sub-group reports made public, but DUP members of the committee argued for confidentiality.

If true, that implies that the DUP, for all its doubts about republican delivery, is thinking seriously about going into government.

Delivery

Why else would confidentiality be so important?

So how will the plot develop in Stormont Confidential?

Keeping future policy options secret implies serious intent, whilst exposing alleged behind the scenes contacts indicates fragility on all sides.

With the extraordinary ard fheis and an election looming, it's still uncertain whether Tony Blair will be proven right in predicting that his 26 March deadline will be met.

Of course this is not the first time supposed secret contacts have been highlighted.

When the British government's "back channel" to the IRA was exposed in the 1990s it led to all sorts of controversy and recriminations in the short term.

But in the longer term political realities dictated that both sides had to pick up where they left off and move ahead with more public diplomacy.