As it becomes more apparent that David Trimble owns the peace process the cry of "to hell with your concessions we want our rights" seems to have changed and the word concession is now a respectable term. Now that David Trimble (with the backing of the British establishment) decides the pace and direction of this process we are in no doubt that there is nothing in this process for us. The politicians who defended this process and predicted it would bring about great social and economic change now winge about the British breaking their promises and not honouring their commitments. Who of us would expect anything different from the British establishment? The old war cry "you can’t trust the Brits" seems to have changed too. Some things never change and all the winging about Brits not keeping their promises will certainly not bring about the changes we desperately need.

The process of lowered expectations continues. Bernadette McAliskey described this in a recent speech in New York. She gave an example of workers having to take a wage cut even though somewhere in their heads they feel its time for a pay rise. They get bogged down in their fight to prevent the wage cut and when they win the right to keep their pay static for the next three years. They feel it’s a victory because they didn’t have a wage cut and everybody forgets that the discussion actually started with people being entitled to more money.

David Carlin of the SWP high-lighted this thinking in issue 3 of Fourthwrite. He rightly pointed out that when the Jubilee maternity services were closed in favour of keeping the RVH services open the heated debate and argument which ensued was not about keeping both services opened. The focus was on the closure of a service.

The term demilitarisation is now widely used so if the military presence is removed from places like South Armagh there are those who would dress it up as a victory and forget that the discussion actually began with British withdrawal. Likewise the term reform replaces the term disband in relation to the RUC.

When David Trimble flexed his muscles again and prevented the Health minister Bairbre de Brun from attending her cross border meeting with free state counterpart Micheal Martin. De Brun decided to go ahead with the meeting. The media hailed it as a bold gesture of defiance. The "pan-nationalist" front defying Trimble. The farce of it all did not go unnoticed. While Martin was promoting a cross border health initiative not everybody was deflected from the lacking health service he has responsibility for. A health service in crisis. He was recently threatened with imprisonment by a high court judge because he did not honour a legal obligation to address the needs of a disturbed child in his own jurisdiction.

It has emerged that years of neglect in this area has led to disturbed adolescent’s in need of therapeutic interventions to be detained in the archaic, under funded and under developed psychiatric system.

Not everyone forgets that while the Stormont Health Minister was posing for the photographs to display her bold gesture of defiance, patients were waiting on trolleys for a bed in Craigavon Hospital while South Tyrone hospital lies empty - the same hospital she was forced to close recently. It is time the public woke up to what is going on.