I WAS walking on Shipquay Street in Derry in late November/early December 2016 when I met a well-known local character.

We were shooting the breeze about all sorts of local issues for about 10 minutes, but just as we were about to part, he remarked: “You know things are not going well up in Belfast. I think the Shinners are about to pull the plug on Stormont.”

About five/six weeks on from that conversation, on a cold Monday afternoon in January 2017, I get a message to turn on the telly where I see a clearly very ill-looking Martin McGuinness, then deputy first minister, announcing he was resigning his post with immediate effect in protest at first minister Arlene Foster’s refusal to step aside, even temporarily, in regard to the ‘cash for ash’ debacle.

Why I recall this so well was that about two hours later, I was watching the RTÉ main evening news bulletin where the late Tommie Gorman, their northern editor, breathlessly intoned that McGuinness’s resignation was a real bombshell, and that events north of the border had taken the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, and his government by surprise.

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That to me was unbelievable.

Here we were having a massive political eruption on this island, with massive potential implications, but Kenny & co hadn’t a clue about it.

What struck me back then as truly odd was this: if I could randomly meet a wee Derry man and during a casual conversation he could........

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