KEY POINTS:
As Northern Ireland strives to show that its veil of misery can be lifted and power-sharing achieved, it has been given a smack on the head from an unlikely quarter.
One of the country's smartest thinkers, in New Zealand for his son's wedding, Richard Warner doesn't beat about the bushes he poked among for 40 years as its senior archaeologist.
The Cambridge-educated scientist believes they're all kidding themselves. "I'd love to see Northern Ireland come out of the Dark Ages but it won't under the present leadership. It'll take a decade before people become educated enough to realise they're going nowhere".
Dr Warner has had a lifetime of jousting and confronting Northern Ireland's "troubles".
As a young Queen's University researcher from England before joining the Ulster Museum in 1966, and an atheist, he was appalled at the way Catholics were treated and joined the Civil Rights movement, marching and shouting. "But things went from bad to worse, I felt ground down and moved on."
Field work often took him to the "bad lands" of south Armagh where soldiers and police took an interest in his fossicking around. At the sound of the plummy explanations, disbelief turned to warnings - but Dr Warner soldiered on.
It paid off handsomely - Armagh was the scene of his greatest triumph.
He tripped on a large stone in a field only to find a quern, an Iron Age corn grinder, about 2000 years old. "It was one of the greatest days of my career." The quern is now in the museum to which he devoted a lifetime's work.
Despite the use of computers and digital imaging, he believes a need will always exist for archaeologists "to reconstruct past ages for which there is no written or visual record. I use computers but I'm not convinced that being forced to rely on them is a safe thing."
Dr Warner, who has retired to a rustic cottage near Belfast to broadcast and write, also has strong views about museums which he sees as having two functions; as storehouses of cultural and natural history and interpreters for the general public. But, unfortunately, too many of them were seeing themselves as entertainers, affecting their educational roles.
