The Hillsborough Declaration contained one proposal which, more than any others, took people by surprise. The proposal was that around the time when it is envisaged that some weapons would be put "beyond use", a day of reconciliation would be held. Beyond saying that there should at the same time be an act of remembrance of all victims of the Troubles, the declaration gave no indication of what exactly the authors had in mind.

One thing, however, is fairly clear. The framers of the declaration set the day of reconciliation in the context of decommissioning and possible demilitarising of the whole situation. Indeed, it seems probable that they envisage the proposed day of reconciliation as setting some sort of seal on the agreement signed up to by the parties on Good Friday 1998. It may be that they see the day as a sanction which could serve to lock people into the agreement.

But, if so, we are faced with a misunderstanding of serious proportions. For the Good Friday Agreement is not about reconciliation. It is about political accommodation - nothing more and certainly nothing less. It does not give anyone exactly what they wanted. But, for all that, it has the potential to facilitate us in living and working together with some dignity. It enables us to agree to disagree and, modest as that step is, it is nevertheless a significant one in Northern Ireland and indeed in Ireland as a whole.

But there are things which a political accommodation cannot promise to deliver. The Good Friday Agreement does not in itself involve anyone in acknowledging their responsibility for what went wrong. Much less does it call people, or enable them, to seek or grant forgiveness. Least of all does it promise reconciliation. That being said, however, its implementation might just nurture the conditions, social, political and economic, under which reconciliation could take place later.

For many of us the proposal that there should be a day of reconciliation within a month or so remains premature or, in effect, a rash attempt to jump two hurdles at once. Long before reconciliation there are primary tasks to be tackled: (1) We have got to grit our teeth to tell and hear as accurately as we can what happened during those 30 years; and (2) we have to set out on the long and prosaic task of learning to work together on specific projects. These must themselves be undertaken within structures generally acceptable and stable enough for us to come gradually to take one another for granted. What we really must not try to do now is to set up a great symbolic act of reconciliation in the interests of shoring up or sanctioning the political accommodation already arrived at.

One wonders too whether enough thought has been given to inclusiveness in all this. For if it is the case that a significant number of people are still distrustful and resentful or bitter, then (however much we may regret it) the time is not ripe for a general act of reconciliation. Besides that, those who have suffered the loss of loved ones cut off under terrible and cruel circumstances might be excused if they refused an invitation.

Representative church people who choose to take part in such an act of reconciliation as seems to be envisaged will quite properly run up against the accusation that they are encouraging others to be reconciled here and now, while reconciliation among the churches themselves is postponed indefinitely. But, more seriously, they are likely to be seen as reluctant to take seriously either the suffering of the victims or the guilt of the perpetrators in their facile eagerness to get all the unpleasantness out of the air in one go.

The declaration appears to envisage two things as happening - (i) an act of reconciliation, and (ii) a commemoration of all the victims of the troubles.

Now the second of these is also a generous aspiration, but it presupposes a greater consensus as to who in fact the victims are and who the perpetrators are than exists at present. People have to travel much farther down the long road towards reconciliation than most of us have done before they can share memories or weep side by side.

For too many even yet, the intense obligation to keep faith only with our own dead is paramount, and the best we can expect from the "other side" is that they face up to the deaths they caused. We are still a very long way indeed from having a shared sense even of who the participants in the conflict have been or what role they played - not to speak of agreeing on who exactly the victims of these years have been.

So, if there has to be some sort of public event, let it not be an act of reconciliation yet. But let the organisers bear in mind what stage in the process we have reached. What we more or less have now is a political accommodation. We would do well to express our gratitude for it (despite its shortcomings) to all those who worked to bring it about. If there is to be some sort of public event in the near future, we could begin with that.

Then we could go on - not to declare presumptuously that reconciliation is happening here and now, but rather to pledge ourselves to tell and to hear the truth about the past. We could then pledge ourselves to work to create the conditions which could enable us to receive the gift of reconciliation in the future we all crave.

It is worthwhile for Christians to remind themselves (if no one else) that reconciliation has already been won at some cost. Our task is to appropriate it, at whatever cost to ourselves and our group. To be openly grateful for what we have already and to pledge ourselves to get our society ready to receive together the reconciliation we earnestly hope for when its time has come - that is enough to do in the meantime, without forcing the pace.

Terence McCaughey is a Presbyterian minister and senior lecturer emeritus in Irish in Trinity College, Dublin