The rain was falling like tears over Stormont and the Belfast City Hall this week as the once great bully-boy Unionist clan staggered once more from the crossroads towards the cliffs.

Like the charge of the Light Brigade, the 800 horsemen of the Unionist Council are to be invited to ride into the valley of death on Monday week. That could be the end result of the turmoil inside the party as the wrangle between its fumbling leader, David Trimble MP, and his baby-faced Nemesis Jeffrey Donaldson MP reaches a climax after years of bitter infighting and back-stabbing. Donaldson, with help from Bill Craig’s old Vanguard aide, David Burnside, is flogging the controversy over the decommissioning of the 5,000 home-based Royal Ulster Rifles for all it’s worth to topple Trimble and hopefully tear a hole in the Good Friday Agreement.

With the Stormont Assembly closed down and the election of a new house suspended by Britain indefinitely, the debacle of unionism seemed complete at the city hall when an SDLP lord mayor, Martin Morgan, succeeded Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey. Maskey, one of the most successful first citizens in years, brought about many changes in this once unionist holy-of-holies and received high praise from all sides. At 36, Councillor Morgan is one of the city’s youngest ever lord mayors and promises to produce a manifesto setting out his goals of creating a common agenda for all the citizens. With the whole unionist establishment in a state of chaos, their future at the city hall looks uncertain.

Commenting on the latest threatened upheaval in the Stormont party, Michael McGimpsey spoke of the opposing groups shooting themselves in the foot, but ex-minister Sam Foster from Fermanagh angrily visualised the party rather shooting itself in the head! Other breakaway unionist groupings seem on the verge of collapse, including Bob McCartney’s UK Unionists, reporting yet another resignation. Bob’s rickety clan has been in decline since Cruise O’Brien, joiner of lost causes, frolicked ‘up there’ before fleeing back to Howth. Contemplating the whole unionist family, including Paisley’s Stormont duplicity, there is only one word to describe the present state of confusion and stagnation and that is ‘implode’ – to collapse visibly inward, under pressure, burst inside. The oft-quoted ‘those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad’ seems to fit the picture when we realise that they brought this calamity on themselves.

After the ghastly bigoted regime of Brookborough, reformers like Terence O’Neill and Brian Faulkner were thrown to the wolves and a succession of old time boobies appointed – hopefully to bring back the ‘good old bad days’ – but time was not on their side.

The world has moved on from the time warp of 1690, 1912, 1916 and all concerned had better take that on board if we are to escape at last from the dead past.

Laughably there are a few Rip Van Winkles around even in the current controversy about the fate of Donaldson’s private army, the home-based Royal Irish Rifles. One elderly old boy, a member of Ballymena council, hit the headlines this week about the need for such a force because he feared the possibility of an invasion of loyal Ulster by the Irish army to join up with the local IRA for the takeover of the fourth green field! Sounds as if he fell asleep around 1969 when Taoiseach Jack Lynch stirred up a similar scare, that the nationalists were under attack at Bombay Street and the Bogside. Lynch said the south would not stand idly by, but that was the height of it. The only other invasion I can recall was the DUP fiasco by Robinson’s ‘Slattery’s mounted fut’ to the village of Clontibret across the border.

Finally, into the blasted heath of unionism and its tales of woe comes a welcome visitor from Dublin, foreign affairs minister Brian Cowen, to reassure the millions who voted for the only way forward that there is no Plan B and the agreement is the ‘only show in town’.

He should know!

Donaldson and Co can put that in their pipe and smoke it.