Last Saturday, in the Navarran town of Estella, 23 Basque organisations, ranging from political parties to cultural groups and trade unions, set out their blueprint for resolving the conflict in the Basque Country, which has cost more than 800 lives since ETA carried out its first killing in the summer of 1968.

The parties involved include radical nationalists close to ETA, constitutional nationalists opposed to violence, and the non-nationalist United Left coalition. Together, these parties hold 47 of the 75 seats in the Basque autonomous parliament. It is not coincidental that elections to this parliament, which enjoys rather more devolved power than Stormont ever did, take place next month.

The joint declaration uses deliberately vague language but, essentially, espouses self-determination, conceivably leading to full statehood for the Basque regions in both Spain and France. The proposal apparently persuaded ETA that it could dispense with armed struggle. The truce announced last night is said to be "unconditional", but it would be naive to imagine that ETA will abandon its campaign without getting anything in return.

However, the "Pact of Estella" has been roundly denounced by the two main Spanish parties. Both the governing Partido Popular (PP) and the opposition Socialists regard it as a capitulation by democrats to the demands of ETA. Only 15 months ago, they point out, all the Basque democratic parties solemnly resolved to boycott all joint initiatives with ETA's political wing, Herri Batasuna (HB). This was in the wake of ETA's cold-blooded murder of the kidnapped Basque PP councillor, Mr Miguel Angel Blanco.

In the face of declining popular support for nationalism, the Madrid-based parties say, the constitutional nationalist parties have abandoned democratic fundamentals. According to the Spanish government, the moderate nationalists are trying to present themselves as peacemakers but have in fact become "complicit" with terrorism.

However, the Estella pact is probably of more than purely electoral significance. It is the product of months of debate between its signatories, who initially banded together as el foro de Irlanda, the Irish forum. If it has an analogue in Ireland, it would be the pan-nationalist front which the SDLP and Sinn Fein were accused of forming. It may be hard to recall it now, but that was during the period when the Hume-Adams talks were regarded as anathema by many Irish and most British democrats.

The Irish peace process has been a hotly contested point of reference in Spain for several years now. To Basque nationalists, both radical and constitutional, it represents a lighthouse showing the way forward. To Spaniards opposed to regional nationalism, it is a dangerous mirage. They recognise that it is beautiful, and even admirable, at a distance but fear it is capable of shipwrecking Spanish democracy if its directions are followed in an attempt to resolve Spain's "Northern war".

IF the Irish and Basque conflicts had no other points in common, then they certainly share the experience of irreconcilable differences. The proponents of different positions in both situations do not simply disagree with each other. They live in different worlds.

Semantics alone immediately illustrates this. To a Basque nationalist, I should not have written the word "Spain" as above, I should write "Spain and the Basque Country". By the same token, to do so would drive many Spaniards (can I call such people "Spanish nationalists"?) to apoplexy. Even the use of the word "conflict" is polemical because it is thought to dignify a "problem of terrorism" with the legitimacy of a "war of liberation".

The very fact that the joint declaration was signed in Estella has a hidden significance. Estella is in Navarre, a province claimed as Basque by the nationalists but which does not have a nationalist majority. Sound familiar?

Irish politicians have almost instinctively picked up these nuances. Speaking in Madrid in May, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, agreed with the Spanish Prime Minister, Mr Jose Maria Aznar, that the Belfast Agreement was not a model for export to the Basque Country.

Strangely enough, he found himself able to recommend the very same model to the Chinese as an aid to resolving their Tibetan problem on his visit to Beijing two days ago. Different strokes, Mr Ahern might say, for different folks, but it is hard to see why we have more in common with an Asian dictatorship than with an EU democracy.

His predecessor, and peace process architect, Mr Albert Reynolds, saw things rather differently. Shortly after he ceased to be Taoiseach, he paid a visit to the Basque Country in which he was courted and feted by Basque nationalists of all shades, and his views were very widely reported in the Basque press.

While he cautioned against any simplistic attempt to apply the Irish peace process pattern mechanically elsewhere, he highlighted elements of conflict resolution which might at least be inspirational in other situations.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein, which has maintained close ties with the political wing of ETA, Herri Batasuna (HB), for nearly 20 years, has had a major influence on the thinking of the Basque radicals. So much so that HB took it upon themselves to denounce the Omagh bombing in the wake of Mr Gerry Adams's groundbreaking "condemnation".

ETA's declaration of a ceasefire is a logical extension of Sinn Fein's influence. But ETA's campaign of assassinating PP local councillors, which continued until early this summer, had suggested that HB wanted to cherry-pick the Irish peace process and get negotiation without an end to violence.

It remains to be seen whether the ETA ceasefire is in fact "a fake", as the Madrid government seems to contend, or represents a real new departure by the group.

Many Spanish democrats have expressed the fear that the "Pact of Estella" shows that the democratic nationalists are being seduced by ETA, whereas, as they understand it, the SDLP won over Sinn Fein to democracy in Ireland. Even in expressing this fear, however, they are recognising that there are some parallels between the two situations.

The only essential parallel, however, is surely that in any peace process both sides have to make real concessions. If ETA definitively abandons terrorism, can the Spanish concede the right of the Basques to decide, peacefully and democratically, their own future, wherever that may lead?