WITHIN weeks of the Provisional IRA ceasefire, Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, wrote an epilogue to a book they'd just finished on the previous 73 years in the North.
While the republican leadership appeared to be locked into a purely political process, they suggested, much still depended on the Irish and British governments and the Northern parties.
It was for them "to resolve a on a new pattern of unionist nationalist relationships which, while based on the principle of consent, would foreclose forever the possibility of another armed conflict".
The responsibility and the best hope for the North still rests with the politicians, local and national. But, in spite of John Bruton's brave words in the Dail on Thursday, the project remains at risk.
Indeed, the greatest spur to those engaged in it may well be the fear of failure and the certainty of what failure would mean to people on all sides who have suffered deeply and who deserve better.
When the cessation of operations was announced it took time for optimism to grow as commentators and their audiences began to be persuaded that, despite doubts about the precise meaning of some statements, the ceasefire was meant to last.
Now, it's clear the republican leadership was not as securely locked into the political process as Bew, Patterson and Gibbon believed when they completed their book Northern Ireland 1921-1994 (Serif, London).
And the attempts of the governments and the parties to find that pattern of relationships which would foreclose forever the possibility of armed conflict are in danger of running into the sand.
The IRA ceasefire is over, for the time being at least. The best guess of those who have guessed accurately in the past is that there is no prospect of its being resumed.
The loyalist ceasefire, too, is shaky. The politicians closest to the paramilitaries, David Ervine and Gary McMichael, are clearly alarmed and depressed by the debates going on in their areas.
Sinn Fein is not at the multi party talks. The unionists have spent weeks arguing, first, about George Mitchell's role, then about whether the discussions amount to negotiation.
DURING and since the confrontation at Coalition has come under increasing pressure to abandon its even handed policy in favour of a more aggressive approach to Northern affairs.
No sooner had the RUC batoned nationalists off the road or confined them to their homes than the Government's attitude to Sinn Fein was raised by Sean O'Rourke on RTE's News at One.
The Government had decided after the murder of Jerry McCabe, the explosion in Manchester and the discovery of a rocket assembly in Laois that contacts with Sinn Fein should be through officials only and all it wanted to hear was news of an IRA ceasefire.
Because the ceasefire has not been resumed, Sinn Fein excludes itself from the multiparty discussions on the future of the North.
Why either of these prohibitions one imposed, the other self inflicted should be changed by what happened at and after Drumcree was not clear. But the idea was in the air.
The Sunday Business Post, whose political location is somewhere between Gerry Adams and Michael Portillo with a dash of nostalgia for the old time religion went a more sickly shade of green.
Instead of injecting a new dynamic into the peace process, it said. "The Government should rethink its attitude towards the British government and start playing hardball."
What this would achieve isn't explained, though there are vague references to internationalising the problem and table thumping in the European Union.
One of the paper's columnists, Tom McGurk, puts the question. "Can anyone now believe that unionism is capable of making a deal or that, if it did, London is capable of policing it?"
And he comments. "The whole ethos of nationalism, built as it is on the premise that there is a solution deliverable within the current constitutional position in the six counties... has now been gravely, if not terminally damaged."
If constitutional nationalism, built on the principle of consent, had been so seriously damaged, what then?
In The Irish Times on Tuesday, John Waters suggested an answer. He too believed, Drumcree had provided an insight into the reality of life in the North, of "unionist fascism and British support for it".
He wrote "Isn't it time to follow through the logic of our responses in the past fortnight and state clearly that we believe Northern Ireland to be incapable of reform, and that, sooner or later, we will have to begin a process of unification as the only way of permanently resolving the issue?"
PROINSIAS De Rossa commented on the column in the Dail on Thursday. "It does nothing but harm to any hope of political accommodation on this island to talk... of bigotry being the essence of unionist politics and `unionist fascism'.
This is a profound insult to the tens of thousands of unionists who fought, together with nationalists from North and South, against fascism in the second World War.
"It is a despicable slight on the decency of the vast majority of Northern Protestants who would have nothing but contempt for the fascist thugs who murdered Michael McGoldrick in Lurgan."
I agree.
But suggestions of a nationalist consensus are rarely based on hope of political accommodation. And the idea of a pan nationalist front was first proposed by Sinn Fein to extend its sphere of influence.
In theory, the front is led by whoever is Taoiseach. In practice, leadership would be held by those who were most extreme, by Sinn Fein and since the same principle applies within the republican movement by the IRA.
After years in which it was taken for granted that John Hume inspired, if he didn't actually write, Northern policy, the task would fall to Gerry Adams.
That's where suggestions of a nationalist consensus would lead. And remember that these suggestions are bound to proliferate in what threatens to be a wicked month.
Not only are the Apprentice Boys planning to march in Derry on August 10th a day earlier republicans will be remembering the 25th anniversary of one of the North's security disasters the introduction of internment.
Here we can expect the political temperature and the mood of the public to be raised by some reporting which, if the experience of Drumcree and after is anything to go by, will be one sided and close to hysterical.
After Drumcree the impression was created, largely but not solely by reports on radio and television, that only nationalists had been attacked or intimidated, that nationalists alone were forced from their homes.
Even the attempt to destroy a memorial to the eight Protestant workers who were murdered at Teebane Cross in January 1992 had passed almost unnoticed when Dick Grogan and Fintan O Toole wrote about it here.
One sided reporting would help to create or maintain a pan nationalist front. It doesn't help the work which George Mitchell and his colleagues are engaged in, with the support of the parties in the Republic.
Playing hardball with Britain, proposing unity as the only solution and tub thumping at home or abroad would be, if anything, even more unhelpful. Besides which, these are policies which were tried and failed.
Indeed, if the Government wished to contribute to a reduction of fear and suspicion in the North it might adopt a proposal for constitutional change made by Jack McQuillan, a former TD and senator.
He suggested an amendment which retained the aspiration to unity but instead of regarding it as an imperative, as the Supreme Court did in the McGimpsey case forbidding the use of force to achieve it.