MORE time and space have been devoted to the possibility that the North's multi party talks will tail than to the challenge to make them work.
But as people ask themselves how and why fear, mistrust and resentment have reached their present levels it's up to the parties of the middle ground to prove they have the ability - and the will to raise the community's sights.
It's for John Hume, David Trimble and John Alderdice - to recover for constitutional politics the ground lost to passionate extremes and cunning manoeuvres during the summer.
Indeed, to judge by reports, it was the ground occupied by their parties which fell to the extremes as the events at Drumcree, and the events which preceded and followed that confrontation, revived old antagonisms.
We know only too well what happened at and after Drumcree.
Some in the Republic are apt to forget the IRA's bombing and shooting, and preparations for other attacks, which went before.
Nor should we underestimate the difficulties faced by the SDLP, the UUP and the smaller parties - including the loyalists praised by Bill Clinton - who must face opposition on their doorsteps as well as further afield.
As Dick Spring suggested the other day, the fact that the main unionist and nationalist parties have met for several weeks, and will meet again on Monday, is in itself an achievement.
TOGETHER, they represent a majority in the North. Whether it's a majority that can achieve agreement depends to a great degree on their leadership.
There's little point in expecting leadership from the DUP as the party's leader, Ian Paisley, calls for the exclusion of the fringe loyalists and William McCrea addresses what amounts to a paramilitary rally in Portadown.
The DUP, like Sinn Fein, knows only one air: what might be described as the constitutional imperative. The Union or else? A united Ireland or else?
The fact that, among those from whom they demand support, in Britain or the Republic, they've ruined their chances of winning any, doesn't seem to have sunk in. Out on the wings, the protagonists persist.
The leadership must come from those who've braved the fundamentalists and remain convinced that constitutional politics - not the constitutional imperative reinforced by threats of violence - stands a chance of success.
Of course, there are other possibilities. The one most frequently suggested lately is that the governments could take matters into their own hands and impose an arrangement of their own devising.
Would it work? Could it work without majority support or widespread disruption?
Some in Sinn Fein, prompted perhaps by their British friends and supporters, believe they can wait for the return of a Labour government.
Others, with the encouragement of friends in the South, banker for the old days and Albert Reynolds's promises of salvation, and look forward to a change of government here.
While they're waiting, they might reread the chapter headed "Sinn Fein Will Pay a Price for Going to Capitol Hill" in Sean Duignan's One Spin on the Merry Go Round.
Duignan quotes Reynolds on John Major's doubts about the wisdom of allowing Gerry Adams into the United States: "John is very upset now but the Adams visa will advance the peace. Sinn Fein will pay a price for going to Capitol Hill.
"A lot of powerful people went out on a limb for Adams.
"If he doesn't deliver, they'll have him back in the house with the steel shutters (Sinn Fein headquarters) so fast his feet won't touch the ground.
"We're slowly putting the squeeze on them, pulling them in, boxing them in, cutting off their lines of retreat."
There's politics for you.
Whatever else he may change - if and when Fianna Fail manages to share power again Bertie Ahern won't move far from that approach.
Anyone expecting major change with the arrival of a Labour government in Britain may also be disappointed.
The left, generally considered more sympathetic than the right, is often just as confused by Irish affairs.
First, there's the guilt with which it approaches every relic of imperialism: it causes almost as many distortions as the self righteousness of the right.
Then there's the gap between the left's theories about post colonial societies and the way the Irish, especially those in the South, see themselves.
The forces of liberation, who've not only won independence for themselves but eased the left's guilt for a disreputable past, are automatically accorded the status of comrades.
So the nationalism of a post colonial society is immune from all but the most perfunctory criticism, and anyone opposed to it is out of touch or out of order.
This is the line followed by those on the left of the Labour Party, by communists of the old school and by what remains of the Troops Out movement.
You'll hear it from Tony Benn but not from Tony Blair or Mo Mowlam, who has more than once warned Sinn Fein that expecting a change of policy to follow a change of government is pointless.
I heard Desmond Greaves and his friends in the Connolly Association give out their version in London in the 1950s and 1960s. It was, I was surprised to learn in Moscow, still at the heart of Soviet policy on Ireland in the 1970s.
Realpolitik again: western criticism of human rights abuses in the USSR could be countered by Britain's shameful record, from Bloody Sunday to internment, in the North.
I'd imagined that Soviet strategists might have shown an interest in changes in the Republic: the development of a modern, industrial society with the promise of social change, the abandonment of Civil War politics, more understanding of the Protestant working class.
They didn't. And now we have Terry Eagleton and his followers continuing on the old, nationalist tack, acting once more as if in the Ireland of the 1990s nationalism - Orange and Green - were not at the core of our most serious problem.
Yes, there are other contributors to the challenge we face, including poverty and alienation; but what sets working class people to maim and murder each other is not the modernisation or, indeed, the Europeanisation of Irish society. It's the faction fighters' mentality in modern dress.
Prof Eagleton's case comes wrapped in the language of academic criticism. His address (to the Desmond Greaves Summer School was strewn with references to post modernism, triumphalist teleology, antiethocentrism.
Even John Waters, who struggled to his defence on Tuesday, sounded clear by comparison.
Ordinarily Eagleton would have annoyed only those who like arguments to be put as plainly as possible. But one of his main gripes with Irish historians is that they fail to grasp the essence of class politics.
He, it would seem, spends his time talking to other academics. Perhaps about class politics. But not to working class people; he talks about them, over their heads, in a language they do not know.
He reminds me of another academic who put his case (Communist Party of Ireland, Marxist Leninist, as it happens) to the electorate of Monaghan in the 1970s.
I WATCHED him hand his manifesto to an elderly couple in the street in Monaghan town. They set down their bags of groceries, rummaged for their glasses, then slowly read from beginning to end.
The running dogs of capitalism were chased down the page by the lackeys of imperialism and their comprador friends who, no doubt, had been hiding out on the commanding heights of the economy.
But their days were done. The people of Monaghan were advised that salvation, in the shape of the CPI Marxist Leninist, was at hand. Capitalism was about to collapse.
The old people neatly folded the manifesto and handed it back. "Thanks very much, sir," the old man said, "but we're Protestants ourselves".