IN this uncertain world, there are some certainties we can cling to: day follows night, holy water fonts in Orange Lodges are rare, and the DUP’s duodenal ulcer acts up when there is US intervention in the affairs of NEI. The last of these certainties is because the DUP and Britain for several decades insisted that our Troubles were an internal matter, nothing to do with other countries. Especially that big one on the other side of the Atlantic. But then came Senator George Mitchell and the tortuous trail to Good Friday 1998. Like it or lump it, the US was centrally involved. Which brings us to that pesky outsider Richie Neal, Chairman of the Congrresional Ways and Means Committee. In an interview I did with him in Washington in 2018, he said: “We are a guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement. It is our Agreement too. The American dimension is what made it possible to resolve that long-standing dispute”. And now, four years later, here is Neal again, speaking in Kerry last Sunday: “The Good Friday Agreement has worked, and it has worked quite well. We don’t want to see it disturbed.”