More than two years of negotiations, including some marathon sessions at critical points in the peace process, have gone into bringing about Saturday's statement from the IRA.
The negotiations, beginning from the start of the second IRA ceasefire in August 1997, have involved senior Government officials negotiating with and, at times, cajoling the republican leadership to the point reached at the end of last week.
Negotiators see the IRA proposition - that it will allow independent international figures to inspect its dumps and verify that the weapons remain untouched - as a historic compromise on the part of the Provisional republican movement.
The positions negotiated with the Government officials then had to be passed on to the military wing of the republican movement. According to sources close to the negotiations, the republican leadership has faced consistent difficulties in selling any decommissioning terms to its members.
There was overwhelming opposition from rank-and-file IRA members against the notion of surrendering any weapons to the point that this was never seen as a possibility. Given the level of opposition within the Provisional republican movement to any arms surrender, Saturday's statement marks a departure of historic dimensions.
If it holds to its statement, the IRA will move significantly from its position where it was not prepared to allow any form of decommissioning. Independent verification of arms dumps was actually regarded as a much more effective way of ensuring a continuing IRA ceasefire than a simple surrender of a few weapons. Senior police and military figures on both sides of the Border have said that the surrender of some IRA weapons would not be of any significance in a security sense.
The surrender of weapons, like that carried out by the Loyalist Volunteer Force in 1998, is seen as a purely political issue. Any reasonably well organised terrorist organisation can quickly arm itself with a variety of infantry weapons and explosives on the European black market.
Since the ending of the Balkans conflict, Eastern European arms dealers are flooding the rest of Europe with weapons. The anti-Belfast Agreement republicans in the so-called "Real IRA" have bought an unknown amount of weapons from one such source.
Saturday's IRA statement, therefore, holds out the prospect of the inspectors, Mr Martti Ahtissaari and Mr Cyril Ramaphosa, examining the dumps and reporting to both governments. The dumps can then be further examined at intervals to ensure that they remain intact and unused.
This is seen by senior security figures as probably the best alternative to the IRA handing over its entire arsenal. Security sour ces said there was a real prospect of IRA members breaking up the dumps and handing weapons over to dissidents if the Provisional republican leadership proposed any surrender of weapons.
The compromise would appear to meet the IRA leadership's bottom line that it would never surrender guns to either government and, hopefully, assuage unionist fears about the intentions of the military wing of its putative government partners.
It is now expected that Mr Ramaphosa and Mr Ahtissaari could begin their inspection with in weeks if the republican demands for a reinstatement of the Stormont Assembly are met.
The dumps are located in the Republic. It is believed there are a number of large dumps in the south-west. Garda operations in the late 1980s and 1990s uncovered sufficient evidence to point to their existence, probably in underground concrete bunkers.
The IRA was given about 100 tons of weapons, including about 1,000 AK47 assault rifles, surface-to-air missiles, Russian-manufactured heavy machine-guns, six tonnes of Semtex explosive and tonnes of ammunition, by Libya's Col Moamar Gadafy between 1984 and 1987.
Security sources say these shipments still make up the bulk of the IRA arsenal. It is estimated that more than half of the Semtex has been used so there may still be two or three tonnes of this powerful explosive in the dumps.
The Garda believes the arms, after they were brought ashore south of Arklow, were driven across to the south-west, where they were placed in large bunkers, possibly in wooded or mountainous areas. There are plenty of such isolated locations from the Macgillycuddy's Reeks to the Slieve Bloom Mountains.
Although the Garda knows about their general location, none has ever been uncovered. The gardai have, however, occasionally stopped weapons in transit from the south-west northwards towards the Border. Several smaller bunkers have been uncovered in the midlands and, particularly, around north Co Meath and Co Cavan, where the arms are temporarily stored before being moved across the Border.
In recent months, the head of the IRA's "southern command" has travelled to the south-west on several occasions and has had prolonged talks with a Co Cork man who is said to have control over the major arms dumps. The Cork man is understood to be suspicious of the Belfast Agreement and there were reports that he was on the point of joining republican dissidents.
He once worked as a forester and has an intimate knowledge of the mountains in the region, and has become a key figure because of his control of the arms dumps. If he had joined the "Real IRA", there was the prospect of power switching to the dissidents with damaging consequences for the entire political process.
However, it appears that he has been persuaded to follow the leadership line by the southern commander, a man in his early 40s from a well-known west Belfast republican family. This man, who lives outside Dublin, has been consistently loyal to the republican leadership of Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness and supports the Belfast Agreement.
Both these figures will now have important functions in arranging for the inspection of the dumps by Mr Ramaphosa and Mr Ahtissaari.