Today John Reid faces up to the fact that at the moment the people of Northern Ireland can't govern themselves, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor.
A favourite observation of Northern Secretary Dr John Reid from his early Glasgow communist days relates to the battle between the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.
It's apt, because as Dr Reid prepares to pull the drapes over the Assembly and Executive, it's obvious that the next stage of this stalled political process is to decide whether hope can triumph over bitter experience.
It's perfectly possible, but it might take considerable time because at present pessimism is in the ascendancy. Spirits are flagging, understandably so.
"The Assembly chamber and the great hall of Parliament Buildings, Stormont, are going to become sad and lonely places," said one official as he prepared for today's mothballing of many, although not all, of the systems of devolution.
British ministers from across the water will prepare to carry out the work previously done by David Trimble, Mark Durkan, Martin McGuinness, Peter Robinson and the other ministers in the power-sharing Executive, because here are a people incapable of governing themselves.
They will work in close harmony with Irish ministers, because the additional point is that if local politicians, representing nationalists and unionists, can't do the business, then two sovereign governments representing similar constituencies must work together.
There will be a greater role for the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. While the agreement may be in suspension, the British and Irish governments are also anxious that the North-South implementation bodies continue to function and that the surprisingly successful Policing Board - even if legally it must temporarily collapse - will be quickly resurrected.
The vast majority of the Assembly's 108 members wish it wasn't like this, even those DUP politicians who profess to be avowedly anti-agreement.
If Dr Reid doesn't make special arrangements for them, the First and Deputy First Ministers will suffer pay cuts of £79,000, ordinary ministers cuts of £46,000 and MLAs cuts of £12,000.
They may all end up on a scaled-down salary of £29,000, as happened in the three-and-a-half months suspension of 2000. What will their spouses, partners and families think of that, particularly if the suspension period grinds on indefinitely? And if the suspension runs for six months or more, then the British government may judge it's pointless paying even reduced salaries for glorified councillors, as opposed to legislators, merely to carry out constituency work.
It's also a financially worrying time for the 317 members of the Assembly secretariat. Of these, 83 are secondees who can return to the Northern Ireland civil service, but what about 244 Assembly employees who could face redundancy?
Out beyond the Stormont perimeters, the public has been following the latest developments with a mixture of fatalism, cynicism and disappointment and, of course, in some cases with exultation.
Devolution could have impinged more on people's lives. Yet while it tends not to be in the nature of gritty Northerners to embrace wholeheartedly political change, most people wanted the local structures to work. Unionists, unlike nationalists, had no great love for the overall agreement but the more reflective understood that the logic of its cross-community consensual philosophy was inescapable.
The more reflective generally are conscious of the dangers ahead. It's a cliché but true nonetheless that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
This is the time when the paramilitaries can come into their own.
The UDA, when it isn't killing each other or competing over drugs and racketeering empires, is working to an anti-agreement agenda. A big prize for that organisation would be to drag the IRA back into war. Martin McGuinness says the IRA won't fall into that trap, but there are no guarantees.
Belfast historian and commentator Brian Feeney has written about people here living in parallel universes: it was certainly evident over these troubled days. Many nationalists, and most Sinn Féin members, seemed to be in absolute denial that unionists could have difficulties with the IRA allegedly compiling a potential hit list of prison officers or the IRA effectively and allegedly looking over Dr Reid's shoulder as he did his business with David Trimble, Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, and George Bush. It just did not seem to register for them.
Equally, many unionists can't seem to figure that almost exclusively focusing on IRA activities, when the only groupings killing people at the moment are loyalist paramilitaries, conveys to nationalists that deep at heart many unionists are unreconstructedly sectarian.
Republicans and nationalists must accept that unionists have real concerns about how the IRA is playing this process. Equally unionists must realise that politically there can be no more Sinn Féin-free zones. The fact that Peter Robinson appeared with Martin McGuinness on UTV last week indicates a widening acceptance of that reality.
So, as Dr Reid believes, can a dynamic form of hope triumph over the logic of despair? There is a way out, but, as stated, there are no guarantees, anything can happen in the next few months. Politicians will need time to be re-energised. Getting beyond the legal cases relating to Colombia, Castlereagh, hit lists, and Stormont espionage, would help. Thereafter, Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair will re-impress on the IRA that it would need to cease its adventures.
There are the makings of a deal that would bring us all back to the agreement. They revolve around issues such as demilitarisation, policing, perhaps a Border poll for David Trimble, perhaps visible decommissioning by the IRA and some credible indications that it intends to become a superannuated force.