THE case of the Sinn Féin references (Agatha Christie could do better, I feel) has seen BBC Ulster pour its considerable resources into a working week-long dive under the Arctic swell to examine what lies beneath the iceberg’s tip. Culpability, we’re told, is to be apportioned way beyond the two press officers who retired to the library together with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver.

I don’t know where the blame will come to rest. It may well be that this will end the careers of others; it may well be that the media has come down with another Bobby Storey funeral fainting fit. And the reason I don’t know is because after days of huffing and puffing, the Beeb was reduced at last week’s end to interviewing journalists about the matter.

Let me tell you something about journalists interviewing journalists: It’s all filler, no killer.

• A Netflix series that should be two episodes instead of six.

• A L’Oreal moisturiser box that’s five times the size of the little container inside.

I’ve done filler. I’ll probably do it again. In fact, here’s a journalist Magic Circle trick that I might get into trouble with my union over… 

If I’ve a thousand words to write and I’ve run out of things to say at 500, I might fall back on quotes. “Indeed, the words of the Greek philosopher Epicurus on this matter are so profoundly relevant today that, two and a half thousand years later, they are worth quoting at length…”

Google, cut, paste. Job’s a good ‘un.

Similarly, if a radio host has an hour to fill on a subject and has spent four days saying everything that needs to be said, they’ll fall back on journalists talking about the past few days. Think Reader’s Digest rather than Washington Post.

“With me today is the Daily Digger’s political correspondent Phil Whyte, who has been following this story closely, has nothing to add, but is always, always available.

“We’re also joined in the studio by Aine Goboys, who by happy coincidence always has feisty and fearless thoughts on whatever we’d like her to have feisty and fearless thoughts about…”

And off they go. For an hour, give or take, thrilling us with their acumen, dropping names, dropping hints, dropping listeners. 

What the host ideally wants, of course, is somebody who’s part of the story, but he’ll settle for someone who’s reporting the story if that’s all he’s got because the important thing is not that the story is firmed up or advanced, the important thing is that it continues. He wants a whistleblower; he’ll take a snowblower. He wants a protagonist; in extremis he’ll welcome an antagonist.

Over in the inky trade, meanwhile, we had the same people writing the stories about the references writing feature pieces about why people criticising their reporting are bad actors (that's internet troll bad, not Kevin Costner bad).

• Headline 8.30am: ‘Questions mount for SF leadership.’
• Headline 12.30pm: ‘Why keyboard warriors responding to my story really get on my wick’.

The truth is, of course, that the questions that arise are the ones that they’re asking; and people only become keyboard warriors when they don’t clap like seals in their online responses (otherwise, they’re the readers who pay the writers’ wages).

By Monday the story had moved on after two of the reluctant cast – Dáithí Mac Gabhann’s family and the British Heart Foundation – decided that, all things considered, they wanted out of the circus tent to concentrate on matters cardiac . At which point the focus moved from what person or persons known and unknown did or didn’t do to when person or persons known and unknown did or didn’t know about it.

Whether SF heads roll over this depends very much on whether it develops into a scandal or whether the story remains – as SF very much would like it to remain – elusive and unsatisfying, a shifting, drifting, here-it-is-no-there-it-is collection of inchoate allegations and ill-defined responses. As it is, it all rather reminds me of the time I ended up in hospital after being attacked by loyalist bandsmen on Finaghy bridge – it would have been a lot worse if there hadn’t been so many of them throwing punches and kicks at the same time.

On Monday afternoon, Michelle O'Neill sailed through the remarkably becalmed waters of a Stormont chamber which either had no interest in giving her a hard time or didn't have a clue how to. Will the First Minister assure us that this won't happen again?, she was asked. Will she promise that systems have been put in place? Will she work with us to ensure that things are better in the future?

Those weren't hostile questions, those were lifelines, and if I wasn't such a well-rounded person, if conspiracy theories weren't completely anathema to me, I might say something stupid like MLAs have no interest in threatening the institutions again because Christmas doesn't pay for itself.

Unsurprisingly, on Tuesday morning the story missed the headline cut. It lingered, however, with all the depth and solidity of the smoke of a newly-extinguished candle. The new story (crook index and middle fingers, please) was something about security passes... something about the guilty guy's pay structure... something about who employed him five years ago, something about... Well, anything, really. 

“When the herd moves, it moves,” said Boris Johnson about the Conservative Party after it finally ejected him from No.10. That may be true about others parties, but it doesn’t apply to Sinn Féin, who don’t move anywhere without bringing their top people with them. While increasing numbers of those top people have scanty or no memory of the conflict, there is a residual military muscle memory, an adherence to the ‘no man left behind’ doctrine – unless, let it be said, it’s a man who can be left behind with little or no fuss. 

Elsewhere, the quite extraordinary allegation that a senior PSNI officer warned an English investigator that there are too many Kafflicks in the legal profession has become collateral newsroom damage, while DUP Education Minister Paul Givan has emerged smiling from the bunker after the expected barrage over meeting the UVF and the UDA to discuss the schools estate failed to materialise.

All units returned safely to base.