Analysis:DUP leader believes he has led republicans to accept an NI state, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
The Rev Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams made history in Belfast yesterday. But the DUP leader did something more than that. In inimitable fashion, "the Big Man" also confounded Enoch Powell's dictum that all political careers must end in failure.
To some erstwhile believers, of course, this will seem the biggest mistake of Paisley's long life. Though he has correctly divined the general mood of his people, there would inevitably be tears in some of the heartlands last night, that he did that for which he denounced all unionist leaders before him, and compromised.
Others too, principally in the UUP - but also in the SDLP - were plainly soured and bemused at the spectacle of "Dr No" finally, famously, saying "yes".
For practitioners and admirers of realpolitik, however, it would have been hard to resist at least sneaking regard as the fundamentalist preacher cum lucky politician seized his opportunity and set his terms, then struck out and grasped the prize.
Prof Henry Patterson caught something of the conflicted mood of many unionists, telling the BBC that in some ways yesterday's events represented "a posthumous victory for David Trimble" - before adding that it was unlikely the former first minister and Ulster Unionist leader would see it that way.
Many will find the grief understandable. And at least some senior DUP figures privately admit that Trimble's original "heavy lifting" made it significantly easier for them to undertake the process culminating in yesterday's DUP/Sinn Féin agreement.
Others in what remains of the UUP, however - and not least party leader Reg Empey - seem pretty philosophical. And so they should be, for this is politics.
Eoghan Harris advised Trimble at key points in his successful negotiation and delivery of the Belfast Agreement. There is no record of the writer offering his talents to Paisley. But he could be forgiven for fancying somebody in the DUP might have been reading him closely.
"If there is one iron law in Irish politics, it is this," Harris wrote recently in his Sunday Independent column: "The more sacred cows you slay, the more somersaults you perform, the higher your standing with the general public. As Sinn Féin found out when it gave up the gun. As Fianna Fáil found out when it gave up fulminating about Irish unity. As the GAA found out when it opened up Croke Park . . ."
The firebrand who built his career condemning all compromisers is now up there with the best of them in grasping the Harris rule that, "like a boxer, any party which wants to hold its ground is going to have to continually change its position".
Not only has Paisley adapted and changed his position, but he confirmed it yesterday with style and apparent confidence.
There had been mistaken speculation in advance that "the question of a picture" with Adams might be "the last hurdle" to be surmounted. But this was never going to be a hole-in-the-corner affair. Lights and cameras were always part of the DUP plan in opening its public dialogue with Sinn Féin on back of Adams's agreement to the deferred devolution date of May 8th.
Intriguing questions persist as to why and when Paisley changed course, and specifically when he decided to determine Sinn Féin support for the police to be the effective equivalent of IRA disbandment, in what was unquestionably a triumph of pragmatism over principle.
The first minister-designate knows he will also have to endure the jibes of those who suspect he was successfully wooed and flattered by an establishment he long railed against.
But who will complain if, as is suggested, family pressures encouraged Paisley to secure a kinder "legacy" than might otherwise have been in prospect?
Big politicians ring the changes and make decisions for a variety of reasons. Of course, in part, these may be motivated by ambition and ego. But that is not a reason to preclude other human emotions and instincts - in this case, a real sense that the people are war weary and yearn for a better future.
Into the mix of calculation and speculation, too, must go Paisley's reasonable contention that others have been required to change, and more radically than him.
He has successfully used his leadership of unionism to further alter an already-transformed political landscape in Northern Ireland. As an editorial in this newspaper observed last week, the comprehensive IRA decommissioning, damagingly denied to Trimble, happened on his watch.
And while governments maintained it could not be done, he successfully made support for the PSNI a requirement of all parties entering government.
In doing so, he thinks to have brought republicans finally to accept the legitimacy of a Northern Ireland state they fought so long to destroy.
Making that changed state work, however, is now the challenge awaiting Paisley and those who will in time succeed him.