There are many more determined media detractors than admirers of the peace process, and apparent disasters like the outburst from Fr Alex Reid are welcome fuel for constantly simmering indignation. As so often before, however, after Jewish distress, unionist anger, the priest's apology and nationalist rallying to him, more considered responses emerged, writes Fionnula O Connor
Outrage voiced most loudly by the DUP palls swiftly in the wider world, since outrage is the DUP's stock in trade. The storm in a tea-cup effect may have been heightened by the sense of disconnection and isolation: that this was an elderly, unworldly man adrift from Northern Catholics, from church hierarchy and indeed from organised nationalist politics. When news programmes played clips of the shouting that preceded the Reid outburst, including the totally fanciful accusation that the shots which started the Troubles came from his monastery bell-tower, the context was clearer. What was said had nothing to do with any strategy. No pun intended: there was no read across.
Call your opponents Nazis, claim they treated Catholics "worse than animals", and you move into the realm of playground insult, well below serious debate. In a way, it was easier to pity Alex Reid because his words were so wild. Paradoxically if, say, he had made the cooler charge that unionism has had supremacist leanings and cherished customs with fascist trappings, there might have been more damage to his reputation as a peacemaker. The discredit to the act he had witnessed such a short time earlier with the Rev Harold Good might have been considerably greater.
The complete absorption of the IRA into a peaceful form of republicanism may well turn out to be another protracted and stumbling business. But there are solid grounds for hope that the past is being irreversibly dumped. Perhaps the most incontestable now is decommissioning.
Even in the blaze of outrage at Fr Reid's remarks nobody seriously suggested that the days and nights of effort invigilated by John de Chastelain were devalued because one of the clerical witnesses had shot himself in the foot.
In subsequent days, it was clear that the DUP was maintaining a new focus on criminality as the area where republicans must now prove themselves. Ian Paisley's party is as brisk as Sinn Féin when it comes to pruning policies, lines or indeed individuals deemed to have outlived their usefulness. It ran with decommissioning while it had resonance.
No matter what its front rank chooses to say in public at moments of high temper, the party leadership clearly believes republicans are in post-war mode.
Theirs is a fractured, morose community and after a lifetime of prophesying doom at the hands of external enemies and internal traitors, Ian Paisley is hardly the man to instil cheerful confidence. Paramilitary loyalism may well treat itself to another bout of destruction when the British government processes the next republican demand, to allow "On the Runs" - absconders, escapees or people wanted for questioning - to return without fear of prison.
Yet beneath the uncertainty and resentment and plain loathing in the wider Protestant community - of a settlement which will put Sinn Féin into government but also, supposedly, guarantee equality of opportunity at every level - there are a few signs of willingness to acknowledge charges long-denied.
No, the more thoughtful said last week, unionists in government were not Nazis and no equation can be made between pre-Troubles Northern Ireland and the Third Reich. But nor was there a golden age in the North to mourn or revere. There were no concentration camps, no gassings, no Holocaust: nor was there equality.
The Belfast Telegraph's Barry White wrote as a veteran Stormont reporter: "There are fewer of us left who remember what life was like before the Troubles." It certainly wasn't the case that unionists treated nationalists like the Nazis treated the Jews. But was there any truth in the way Fr Reid described pre-Troubles Northern Ireland? The "old order" bore no relation to fascism but it was unfair and reactionary, and he didn't regret its passing.
Before violence erupted any unionists who looked critically at their own community's exercise of power took sustained flak from friends, family and colleagues. Over the decades since a number have exuded a sense of anxiety and backed away into painful denial, or just silence. By beginning to analyse unionist failings from the inside, had they helped to justify the IRA? The average unionist now is around 45. What does Stormont mean to them? Carson still lords it on his pedestal, pointing over Protestant east Belfast to the hills around the city.
But when Sinn Féin tore up its abstention pledges and tramped like a new owner through the marbled halls, it consigned the old Stormont to history. Before it truly becomes another country the past will bear more examination - and there will be more embarrassments and setbacks along the way.