As we approach what we hope may be the final phase of the Northern crisis it may be worth while to look back at the tortuous evolution of government policy with respect to Northern Ireland over three-quarters of a century.
In the first stage, when the dust had cleared after the traumatic period of the Civil War, the Free State government sought to approach this problem by seeking to cash in the Boundary Commission cheque that they had been proffered during the Treaty negotiation.
Unfortunately, this cheque proved to be a dud, because - in circumstances that, to me at least, remain obscure - in the final text of the 1921 Treaty the earlier agreed provision that this commission should determine the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland "in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants" was qualified by a syntactically overriding clause.
This was to the effect that in this determination regard should be had to the wishes of the inhabitants "so far as may be compatible with geographic and economic conditions". In practice that qualification was interpreted as precluding any significant Border change.
In a second phase of the evolution of Irish policy, the Cumann na nGaedheal government - Kevin O'Higgins excepted, and within 20 months of the Boundary Commission fiasco he was dead - seems to have been turned off any further serious involvement with Northern Ireland by the traumatic impact of this affair.
And subsequently, for quite different reasons, this proved to be equally the case with Fianna Fail under Eamon de Valera - although it might be more accurate to say that de Valera was never really turned on to Northern Ireland. He explicitly made reunification his third priority, behind both the revival of the Irish language and the further enhancement of the reality of the sovereignty that had been secured in 1931 when the character of Dominion status in the Commonwealth had been transformed by the Statute of Westminster.
Leaving aside the July 1940 decision to turn down the extraordinary British offer of Irish unity in return for Irish participation in the war, the next phase of Irish policy on the North was the all-party anti-partition propaganda campaign launched in 1949 following Britain's response to our declaration of a Republic. This futile and provocative pressure for the return to our State of Northern Ireland in defiance of the wishes of a majority of its inhabitants became the Irish political orthodoxy at least until Sean Lemass's emergence as de Valera's successor a decade later.
Unfortunately, Lemass's courageous insistence on the need to accept the reality of Northern Ireland, and his later initiation of contacts with his opposite number there, were not followed up after his retirement. As a result, our political system was ill-prepared for the explosion that followed.
This unpreparedness was clearly evident from the chaotic reaction to the outbreak of violence in the North by different elements in the Fianna Fail government during the winter of 1969-70. However, the resultant arms crisis finally shocked our political system into a realisation that the security of the State, the restoration of peace in Northern Ireland and the real interests of the Northern minority, all demanded a totally different approach: one in which the priority would be the stabilisation of Northern Ireland rather than continued ineffective attempts to secure its absorption into our State. Since then this has been the central feature of our Northern Ireland policy.
I believe that historians will distinguish two phases in the evolution of this new policy. During the first phase in the 1970s successive governments aimed to secure a power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland in which the minority would be represented by the constitutional nationalists of the SDLP.
At that time the intransigent violence of the IRA, and its delusion that it could force Britain to relinquish sovereignty over the area, automatically excluded Sinn Fein from this process. In any event, that party's tenuous popular support within the minority community made it largely irrelevant to any democratic reform of the political system in the North in the 1970s.
However, these efforts to secure a power-sharing government never recovered from the failure of the British Labour government to face down the 1974 workers' strike at the outset. The years from 1979 to 1982 represented a transitional period in the formation of government policy in relation to Northern Ireland. For that brief period was marked by three changes of government as well as by an abortive attempt by Charles Haughey to negotiate a new approach with the British government; by Margaret Thatcher's tragic mismanagement of the hunger-strike and the consequent emergence of significant support for Sinn Fein in the North; and finally by a deep Anglo-Irish rift caused by the Haughey government's abrupt abandonment of EU post-Falklands sanctions against Argentina.
The emergence in the early 1980s of significant and steadily-growing political support for Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland created an entirely new situation. Thereafter, Irish governments' search for stability had to be concentrated on the rolling back of political support for Sinn Fein/IRA in Northern Ireland.
This approach had two purposes: first, defensively, to secure that this organisation did not become the dominant force in Northern nationalism, and, more positively, that as a consequence it would be forced to reconsider its "Armalite and ballot box" policy and to choose the democratic path.
This entailed a major effort to persuade the British Conservative government to switch from a security-dominated policy, which had proved incapable of avoiding an alienating harassment of a wide swathe of the nationalist community, to one that would give generous recognition to the identity of that community and to the legitimacy of its members' aspiration to a closer relationship with their compatriots in the Republic.
Despite the less-than-full implementation of the security-related confidence-building measures in the Anglo-Irish Agreement, unionist over-reaction to its terms ensured an immediate very positive reaction among nationalists. Sinn Fein lost one-third of its electoral support, and - as Gerry Adams has since revealed - from 1986 onwards began to rethink the effectiveness of its dual "Armalite and ballot box" approach.
IN AND after 1988 John Hume played a crucial role in arguing with Gerry Adams the case for a cessation of violence. And during the past six years four successive Taoisigh have each contributed to this process, nursing along the rethinking of policy within Sinn Fein/IRA while also pressing a precarious and reluctant Major government in Britain to facilitate the transition of Sinn Fein to the democratic process. ail there were, it is true, some brief fractures in the Irish political consensus - both in the 1979-1982 period and later on in the immediate aftermaths of both the Forum Report and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. These hiccups apart, Irish government policy since 1970 has on the whole been consistent and constructive. It is clear that most of the positive initiatives towards a settlement during the past 30 years have come from the Irish side.
At certain periods, when active attempts to find a solution have been under way, British governments have successfully mobilised extensive human resources towards this end. The skills and commitment then deployed have been most impressive.
But a multiplicity of other issues at home and abroad has inevitably often distracted British attention from Northern Ireland. The negotiation that has led to the present detente has been unique in both the scale and the intensity of the British government's involvement and in the extraordinary frequency and intimacy of the Anglo-Irish contacts at government level, as well as in the importance of the role played by the US government.
Looking back over these three decades, three points in particular strike me about the long-term evolution of the Anglo-Irish relationship.
First of all, this process could never have developed as it has but for the personal contacts between prime ministers, cabinet members and senior civil servants of the two countries. Next, there has been a painful unlearning by both sides of past prejudices and preconceptions - perhaps most strikingly and comprehensively in the Irish case, where it involved a radical and comprehensive rethinking of a deeply-held traditional irredentist nationalism.
Finally, one cannot but be struck by the extraordinary intimacy, and warmth, of today's Anglo-Irish political relationship - so far removed from the tensions, misunderstandings and even at times mutual hostility that formerly prevailed.
And this transformation has been the paradoxical achievement of the IRA, for it is in combating that organisation and eventually forcing it to come to terms with the democratic process that our two political systems and, indeed, our two peoples have been brought together, healing the accumulated hostility of many centuries.