The most significant message of the week was contained in Bertie Ahern's welcome to Tony Blair at Dublin Castle on Wednesday night.
The Taoiseach said: "Everyone needs to understand clearly that an armed peace is not what any of us signed up to in the Good Friday agreement."
And the most striking feature of Mr Blair's address next day to the Dail and Seanad - rightly called historic - was the very ordinariness of the occasion. It was as if this was an everyday event: the head of one European government visiting another, invited to address his neighbour's parliament; the host calls him a true friend of the country and the visitor speaks of common interests and shared experience.
It happens, if not every day, often enough to be unremarkable. What was extraordinary in this case was that it had taken so long - a lifetime - for the visit to be arranged.
Of course, it is only now that the issue which has lain between Ireland and Britain since the 1920s finally seems capable of resolution.
But the final decision rests, not with the two governments, but with the political and paramilitary leaders of Northern Ireland, who still circle one another with edgy suspicion.
This is why, seven months after the event, the Taoiseach finds it necessary to say - more clearly and more emphatically than before - that an armed peace is not what the parties to the Belfast Agreement wanted to achieve.
Nor is it the outcome the people of this country endorsed, clearly and emphatically, in simultaneous referendums, North and South, in the month after the agreement was signed.
Armed peace is still all that most of the paramilitaries are willing to offer, for the time being at least. And no one can be sure of their plans (if any) for the 17 months to April 10th, 2000, the date by which the agreement's commitments are due to be met.
Sinn Fein leaders believe they can meet their commitments by April 2000, though they speak more of others' obligations than their own.
Specifically, they blame David Trimble and the UUP for holding up the formation of an executive, a North-South ministerial council and the policy and implementation bodies for which, by all accounts, practical arrangements have been made.
Little more than an hour after Mr Blair's address to the Oireachtas, Gerry Adams spoke to the Institute of Directors in Dublin about the imposition of a unionist veto on provisions endorsed by the Northern parties, the Irish people and the Irish and British governments.
He said: "I am very conscious of the difficulties and the fears that unionists face. They don't trust nationalists and republicans. They don't trust the Irish Government and they don't trust Mr Blair's government."
That is not entirely true. Mr Trimble seems to get on reasonably well with Seamus Mallon. And when some expected him to take umbrage at Mr Ahern's vision of a united Ireland, he simply acknowledged Fianna Fail's dream but said he didn't expect it to come true.
Mr Adams, however, was right about Mr Trimble's mistrust of republicans, and the reason is clear: the IRA flatly refuses to contemplate decommissioning; and, whatever Sinn Fein may say, on this issue the IRA's word is law.
Niall O'Dowd of the Irish Voice, who writes sympathetically about republican affairs, argued in an article published here on Wednesday that "any decommissioning would be a disastrous move for the IRA.
"It would have the effect of moving the issue from a symbolic level to a very real power struggle within their movement if it were attempted, something some republicans believe is the real British agenda anyway."
He claimed that "by refusing to implement the agreement and seemingly holding David Trimble's concerns as paramount in all negotiations, the British and indeed the Irish Government are sending a very dangerous message."
But what must be paramount for the governments, as Mr Ahern made plain in Dublin Castle and Mr Blair in Leinster House, is the agreement reached by the parties and endorsed by the electorates in the referendums:
"We reaffirm our total and absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences on political issues and our opposition to any use or threat of force by others for any political purpose, whether in regard to this agreement or otherwise."
Some may find it convenient to skip this paragraph on the first page of the agreement so they can then get down to more satisfying stuff. Such as: how many republican or loyalist paramilitaries can dance on the head of a semi-constitutional pin sharpened by Sinn Fein and the Progressive Unionists?
Or: how many lives and limbs will loyalist and republican gangs destroy before the would-be politicians say enough is enough? When they do decide to concentrate on politics, they will find tough and daunting challenges around every corner.
David Ervine, Billy Hutchinson, Gary McMichael and others of the PUP and UDP have already rediscovered class politics on the loyalist side. It had lain dormant since the 1930s.
One of the arguments likely to absorb Sinn Fein will be between those who want to persevere on the nationalist front and the proponents of social change, an old concern from the days of Saor Eire and the Republican Congress.
Mr Blair reminded his audience that changes within Ireland and Britain had contributed to changed relationships between the islands; not only in Northern Ireland and between North and South but between the Republic and Britain.
The need for deeper and more durable change in this State was underlined by leaders of Labour and Democratic Left as they set out the terms of their agreement on the union of the parties.
Ireland is now one of two members of the EU which does not have a left-wing or left-led government. Alone among EU states, it has never had major political division along right-left lines.
Yet the need for political division which reflects social and economic conditions has never been clearer. And on the left there is a feeling that the achievement of peace, the final disposal of the national question, provides the opportunity.
When leaders on the left announced this week "Our mission is to build in Ireland a fair and prosperous society, to widen our democracy by reforming and modernising our politics", commentators were of two minds.
One could only ask who would have won. Another claimed to have heard it all before - from Fianna Fail. I don't think they could have been serious.
The challenge to make this a fairer and more efficient place has never been more urgent.