IT'S known as 'tragic over-living'. It's what happens when someone lives way beyond the point at which they would have been remembered much more favourably by posterity.

King Lear and Oedipus are common highbrow examples, but there is Elvis, too. Had Presley died after Jailhouse Rock, his memory would have been untarnished. Instead he went on to make Viva Las Vegas and eat too many burgers. Enough said.

Barbara Stanwyck, likewise, went from film noir greatness to Dynasty spinoff TheColbys. Orson Welles ended up doing whiskey ads. Alex Ferguson is clinging on too long at Old Trafford. Dirty Den came back to Albert Square. All fell victim to the same syndrome.

What goes for individuals also applies to larger political events. The peace process in the North is a good example.

If all had gone according to plan after the Belfast Agreement in 1998, the IRA would be history, decommissioning would have happened, devolution could have kicked in, cross-border cooperation would be up and running nicely, and the North would by now have settled down its historic long-term fate of being as boring as Belgium.

Instead, the peace process didn't know when to lay down and die, but ground on - and on - and, oh God, on again - like a hammy actor who won't leave the stage and just keeps coming back for another curtain call, even as the audience is streaming, bored and embarrassed, towards the exits.

And all the while, stuff kept on happening, as stuff has a bad habit of doing. Before you knew it, everything which had looked so shiny and happy was fracturing messily into bank heists and beatings, and dirty tricks and Catholic men being stabbed to death outside Belfast bars, while Sinn Fein monkeys saw no evil and heard no evil, and certainly spoke no evil of even the most evil of their colleagues.

Naturally enough, most onlookers soon got fed up of it all. Any good feelings which the

'A takeover of the nationalist political apparatus was always part of Sinn Fein's plan'

peace process once engendered simply dissipated away, ruining the memory of all which had gone before. A definite case of tragic over-living.

And next Thursday, in the UK general election, the whole process will come to its (un)natural tragi-comic conclusion, as Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists finally carve up the six counties between them, leaving the mainstream nationalist and unionist parties potentially without any MPs at all.

Even if the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists manage to scrape some scraps of consolation from the polls, it remains by any standards, a major political disaster. Unless you're Sinn Fein, that is. A takeover of the entire nationalist political apparatus was always part of the plan, and now it will come to pass.

It's another triumph for the solipsism of the great (ahem) Northern public. It scarcely matters what happens elsewhere. The war in Iraq has returned with a vengeance to haunt British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the campaign, but word of it has yet to reach Northern Ireland. Taxation? Transport? Education? They care nothing for such trifles.

Instead, the shadow of those dreary steeples of Fermanagh still dominate the landscape, as they have done in every Ulster election since the Jurassic age.

Even within those restricted confines, certain matters pass without mention. Outgoing SDLP veteran Seamus Mallon was warning last week of the impending "Balkanisation of the North"; the Justice Minister Michael McDowell was reiterating that republican plans to create a "state within a state" down South are "well advanced"; the PSNI chief constable was confirming the Taoiseach's recent statement that the IRA is still targetting potential victims.

On the BBC, meanwhile, Newsnight was airing a timely report reminding voters that three of Sinn Fein's most prominent elected representatives - Gerry Adams MP, Martin McGuinness MP, and Martin Ferris TD - sit on the Army Council of the Provisional IRA, and McGuinness was responding with the sort of cold-eyed petulant menace that would have voters elsewhere wondering what on earth they had elected.

But none of it makes the slightest ripple in the North, any more than dead fathers and kidnapped bank workers did, which is why voters will still troop dutifully out on Thursday to return the Honourable Members for Mid-Semtex and Armalite West. This is democratic delinquency on an unimaginable scale, and begs the question: do nationalists actually have a bottom line anymore?

Is there anything IRA/Sinn Fein could do that nationalists would now consider deserving of punishment at the ballot box? If spying, lying, murder, robbery and rearmament get the nod, it certainly doesn't look like.

What, though, is the point of complaining about it? Nothing makes a difference. The North, electorally, is now beyond hope, beyond saving. All anyone on the outside can do is try their best not to join in the madness.

There will be a lot of nonsense talked once the votes are counted, about respecting the democratic mandates of the various victors. But what is there to respect about people who vote Sinn Fein and DUP?

If they sent back Mr Blobby or the Boston Strangler to the House of Commons, would we have to respect that too?

This is like saying thatS Club 7 must be better than Schoenberg because they sell more CDs. The public isn't always right.

When people in the North repeatedly turn out to vote for sectarian demagoguery and backstreet thuggery above all available normal democratic alternatives, then they have not delivered a verdict which needs to be respected.

They have simply provided further evidence that they are collectively, provably and certifiably as mad as a fridge.

- Eilis O'Hanlon