In the end, it was quite remarkable how they all managed to keep straight faces at Hillsborough last Friday morning. The patient has finally emerged from months of intensive political care and was sitting up grinning grimly. Running the North has always been somewhere on the political scale between the panto and the paranoid -and last Friday morning was no exception.

The DUP ‘refuseniks’ were forced to take shelter in the most unexpected of places: within the continuation of power-sharing and by swallowing the new deal with Sinn Féin for the moment.

And ‘for the moment’ may have informed their thinking. The DUP fundamentalists had a terrible and most unexpected shock between their rebellion last Monday at the parliamentary party meeting, and their decision last Thursday to accept the deal.

For hour after hour on radio phone-ins, in letters to newspapers and most of all out in their constituencies, the Nigel Dodds brigade discovered that devolved government was actually highly popular among the general public.

In the North, the unionist population has always been way ahead of its politicians politically -and this time around, its impact was seminal.

In the end, the caucus led by Dodds, Gregory Campbell and Willie McCrea simply didn’t have the bottle to resign or to walk out of the DUP.

For the moment, they reckoned that the best thing to do was to stay where they were and watch developments.

All week, popular opinion in favour of the continuation of devolved government and power-sharing filled the airwaves. As criticism of the delaying tactics of the DUP fundamentalists grew, the walk-out began to look like a much lonelier prospect than they had imagined.

Of course, had they walked, they would, within weeks, have been into Assembly elections, which is what Gordon Brown indicated would happen.

Contesting these in such circumstances could potentially have been simply catastrophic for the DUP.

There is no knowing what the public reaction to their collapsing of devolved government would have been at the ballot box.

Fragmented into three, the unionist vote would have delivered Sinn Féin as the largest party and Martin McGuinness as First Minister. But even worse, there was a real possibility that the unionist vote in favour of devolution could have switched to the UUP, while the vote against would have gone to Jim Allister’s TUV.

In the circumstances in which the DUP fundamentalists found themselves last week, there was simply not the time to organise a wider rebellion.

But make no mistake, whatever about Friday’s optimistic rhetoric from the two prime ministers -and one must acknowledge the prompt and determined fashion in which they acted -the crisis in unionism has not gone away.

In many ways, despite the fact that devolution has been saved for the moment, the last two weeks has profoundly damaged the DUP and the UUP. The UUP’s brief flirtation in secret meetings with the DUP has caused further divisions and, when it was revealed, proved to be hugely unpopular with their friends in the Tory party.

By Tuesday, a panicking Reg Empey was telling anyone who would listen that there was no possibility of his party merging with the DUP or of a new pan-unionist alliance. Already he had suffered the loss of some UUP members at even the prospect of the talks -and the reaction back from the wider party, after they heard of the meetings with the DUP, was hugely negative. There was clearly more to notions of unionist unity than a head count in the Assembly.

For the DUP, the past week has been enormously damaging. The divisions in the party are now out in the open and, as the weeks run towards the Westminster general election, which will probably be held in May, the debate in unionism itself will only deepen.

Allister’s TUV will be campaigning on the familiar slogan of ‘sell-out’ and, given the marginal nature of the DUP majority in at least six of its Westminster seats, the permutations are impossible to predict.

The first power-sharing executive, of which Brian Faulkner had been chief executive, was brought down by the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of May 1974.CouldMay 2010 see an historical repetition?

What the events of the last couple of weeks mean is that the forthcoming general election may also determine the future of the devolved government in the North. Once again, unionists will be asked to answer the fundamental question which they have been asking themselves since 1968.

But it would be a mistake to focus solely on what happened among the political parties in the North in the last few weeks. In response to the DUP fundamentalists’ actions last Monday, there was, for the first time I can remember, cross-community and popular reaction against them. Perhaps at long last there is emerging in the North a political consensus that will punish any party, irrespective of its tribal allegiance, that does not make the new political dispensation work.

Perhaps the powers of some of the North’s political dinosaurs are beginning to wane. Certainly the widespread public reaction to the DUP’s internal crisis suggests that, for the first time, a widespread section of the public in the North have no patience for such goings-on.

The DUP diehards badly misjudged the popular political zeitgeist, damaged the party both publicly and internally and, in the end, have had to suffer a humiliating political climbdown.

But so many questions remain unanswered.

When they go back to work next week, will Robinson and McGuinness be able to create a new working relationship?

Will the agreement on parades - which is essentially passing the buck to a new working group -remain threatening on the horizon? And what will happen to the political temperature in the run-up to the general election?

The North’s political future is still on life-support and the fundamentalists may have one more day yet before the year is out. In many ways, this crisis has merely been suspended-to reappear later.