TO MANY reasserting the primacy of politics threadbare platitude, the kind of ambition that politicians set for themselves when they have nothing more precise to say.
It's usually accompanied by the hope that, by the time the promise is due to be redeemed, the public wills have forgotten about it.
That isn't the case with the promise made by the Irish and British governments in London this week. Nor is there anything vague and ill defined about the obligation which their promise imposes on the North's parties and politicians.
There is a deadline for agreement on the right to march and the way in which it's to be exercised or limited in the interests of both communities and the future of Northern Ireland.
The date is August 10th when the Apprentice Boys are due to march in Derry. But, even before that deadline is reached, as the multi party discussions resume in Belfast next week, constitutional leaders will have to demonstrate their determination to make politics work.
And that means leading, not following at the pace of the slowest plainly acknowledging limitations, not pretending they don't exist selling the message that the best investment in the future is compromise.
Parties which demand all or nothing, whether their all is a united Ireland or a return to Stormont, will end up with nothing. Leaders who pretend otherwise will be swallowed by their supporters.
David Trimble risks this fate. When he returned from Drumcree last week, the smile was on the face of the Orange tiger he'd attempted to ride. He went there to repay the Orange investment in his leadership and ended up contributing to the pretence that a minor victory in a local skirmish amounted to significant success.
Drumcree was not a success for anyone not for the nationalists who were batoned off the road, or for the RUC whose batons may have ensured the alienation of yet another generation of nationalists and certainly not for the unionist parties and the Orange Order.
If the message that Mr Trimble meant to convey to his supporters was that all was well with the unionist family, in the sense that none of its old certainties was about to be disturbed, then he was fooling himself or trying to fool them.
Drumcree is more accurately described as a sign of weakness and lack of direction than as a confirmation of strength. A community that was sure of itself would not have needed to put on the display that Ian Paisley, Mr Trimble and their friends called for.
BUT the most severe criticism of the unionist leaders was not by John Bruton, who went straight for the British government it came from people who favour the union but not at any price, John Alderdice on one side and the loyalist paramilitaries on the other.
Mr Bruton said the British government had been partial and inconsistent. The paramilitaries, as reported by the Rev Roy Magee on UTV on Thursday night, said Mr Paisley and Mr Trimble were playing with people's lives.
But when Mr Trimble was found to have met a former UVF prisoner, Billy Wright, at the height of the trouble in Drumcree, both men insisted that all they'd talked about was the need to avoid violence.
Those who had criticised Mr Trimble for refusing to meet Portadown and Belfast delegations because they included former IRA prisoners were sceptical. They accused him of inconsistency.
Consistency, you've probably spotted, is not a notable feature of politics.
The right to march, now loudly proclaimed by the unionists and resisted by their opponents, was once among the demands of the civil rights movement. A right often officially denied by ministers of home affairs and unofficially by Mr Paisley's friends.
The right, and the political wisdom of insisting on it, was debated at length in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and People's Democracy (PD) before the PD members set off on the march which came to grief at Burntollet.
The question was whether it was wise to walk through hostile territory, so risking, if not inviting, attack. The arguments of those who marched was that even if they were attacked, and they were, it would simply show up the nature of the opposition.
NATIONALISTS of all shades condemned the British government and the RUC Chief Constable for giving way to the biggest threat at Drumcree, though neither the politicians nor Cardinal Cahal Daly said what the police should or could have done.
Have they all forgotten the burning of British embassy offices in Dublin after Bloody Sunday? As the offices blazed of the cheers of tens of thousands of protesters, the gardai who were present stood by.
I'm not sure how many gardai were on duty that night certainly not thousands. But as Ministers looked across Merrion Square when the fire eventually took hold, one suggested that maybe it was just as well.
If the embassy offices hadn't gone up, he muttered, as he wandered off through the corridors of Leinster House to his offices in Merrion Street, the crowd might have turned on something else.
But the burning of the embassy scarcely rated a mention, though several reports managed to compare Drumcree and its aftermath with the events of August 1969, when serious street fighting began in Belfast.
The comparison may have been made simply to spice up reports the effect was to heighten feelings of sectarian hostility by stirring confused memories of events which happened a generation ago.
There were some similarities between 1969 and 1996, but there were important differences, too, among them the fact that in 1969 no one imagined what lay ahead. There would be no excuse for failures of imagination now.
Much damage has already been done. The RUC has been accused, rightly it seems, of alienating a new generation of young Catholics. Solid members of the SDLP, Seam us Mallon and Joe Hendron in particular, have complained of great anger and bitterness among their constituents.
Independent observers report that SDLP supporters are being driven into the arms of Sinn Fein while republicans arguing for a political approach are overwhelmed by their militant colleagues.
Mr Bruton's BBC interview last weekend took Mr Major and his advisers by surprise. Sir Patrick Mayhew felt offended at the Taoiseach's tone of reproof and disbelief. But Mr Bruton's tone, more indignant than he has sounded for years, was a model of restraint by comparison with the fury of many political and journalistic observers in or from the Republic.
On RTE, Charlie Bird went one better than others who had evoked the spirit of 1969 and compared Drumcree with the Battle of the Somme, before becoming all but speechless with excitement.
As the Republic lurched into the greenery, Brenda reasonably of policemen hammering unarmed Catholics off the streets.
Then she went on to explain that this was done so that a gang of bigots with chamber pots on their heads and curtain pelmets around their necks could parade past [the Catholics'] homes to celebrate another year of seeing the Croppies lie down".
And as if to confirm how little has changed on this side of the Border, there was Ulick O'Connor, apoplectic as ever, screeching at fellow guests on the Sunday Show to shut up, for Christ's sake, because he'd heard enough from them.
The motto proposed by Mitchel McLaughlin later in the week was negotiate, don't intimidate. It seemed a reasonable request to the organisers of potentially offensive parades. He'd win plaudits all round if only he could convince the Provisional IRA to adopt it.
But given the IRA's record, from Canary Wharf to Peckham by way of Adare and Laois and Osnabrtick, I don't imagine the IRA will.