Hope fades: lights going out on chance for North peace deal

IN the end, it all came down to a Polaroid photograph.

As the tide of expectation that had welled over two months receded into oblivion last night, both Governments conceded that the latest effort to reach an historic power-sharing deal foundered on a single issue.

And that was the photographing of decommissioning. It came down to the intransigent insistence of one side that it should happen and the intransigent refusal of the other side to be “humiliated”.