It was not, and was never likely to be, a tidy result. What the parties sought at Stormont was an agreement to reflect the way we are, not a shadow of the way we used to be.
Tidying up the past is all very well, if you have time on your hands. But there's nothing tidy about Ireland, North or South, in the 1990s. And politicians are better employed looking to the glorious uncertainty of the future.
No one at Stormont promised an end to violence once and for all. Neither the Treaty nor de Valera's order to dump arms at the end of the Civil War managed to do that.
And if anyone thought it would be different now, the INLA and the Rev Ian Paisley were there to remind them of the paramilitary and political forces ranged against the agreement.
No one said the discussions would end with a blueprint offering instant and infallible solutions to the political problems of these islands. And when the talks were over, no one pretended that that was what they had done.
What the politicians did, with courage, leadership and imagination - qualities with which they are rarely credited - was to prepare the ground on which a stable, peaceful and neighbourly society might be built.
Whether it is or not will depend on the results of two referendums and, we must hope, assembly elections, which will make the choice more democratic than any we've made for generations.
The campaigns have already begun. And for once the best advice is to follow our leaders.
There was a time when, faced with the present challenge, we'd take cover in the past: nothing short of unity would do. But that was when we were addicted to absolutes; and politics was not negotiable.
The round of negotiations just ended has shown us how much more profitable than unbending demands a shift towards compromise can be. The final judgment on the outcome rests, as promised, with the people, North and South.
There were moments this week when it seemed that people here were of two minds: divided between hope of settlement, if only for a quiet life, and determination not to let the unionists have their way.
Among those who favour settlement there are many, an increasing number I suspect, who believe the gap between public policy and popular attitudes to the North needs to be narrowed.
They argue that the claim contained in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution should be amended, not only as part of a bargain with the British government and the unionists but because it no longer reflects political reality in the Republic.
Most people, they say, are either sceptical of the claim as a constitutional imperative (in the Supreme Court's definition) or indifferent to the implication that the Government would be failing in its duty if it didn't pursue it.
Believers in absolutes take the other view. Scratch a Southerner of any hue or a Northern Catholic, practising, lapsed or long-departed, and you will find a nationalist. Or so their argument goes.
Taken to extremes, it grows into the assumption that, given time, demography will decide what politics may not. As Tim Pat Coogan, Gearoid O Cearalain and others put it, the Northern nationalists will soon out-breed the unionists; and that will be that.
While we wait for this final solution - insemination once again? - the rest of us must make do with politics and an agreement that may not be as elaborate as some had hoped, but is all the better for that.
To make the most of it will take time and persistence. The new ways, in new relationships and new institutions, a new spirit of co-operation, will take getting used to.
Relations between the governments will inevitably be closer.
But it has always appeared that unionists and nationalists in the North view Britain and the Republic as extensions of the real struggle, which is theirs, conducted in and about the North.
The Republic and Britain have been sources of comfort and strength; often not as dependable as guardians of political supply lines ought to be; sometimes too ready to see the other side's point of view, or too close to each other, to make reliable allies.
In the Republic, we're used to official statements which turn out in practice to mean less than they once seemed to mean on paper.
Some say Articles 2 and 3 afford protection to Northern nationalists. And some Northern nationalists say they don't.
Unionists claim to find them threatening. (The Supreme Court's judgment added to the impression.) But some unionists also say that changing them won't matter a damn.
Indeed, many in the Republic knew little or nothing about unionists until the civil rights movement was set up and attention shifted from partition to social conditions.
Then they came to recognise something which proved strange and frightening to earlier generations of nationalists: the existence of a Protestant working class, the group which had most strongly resisted Home Rule.
Now we hear for the first time the accents of the Protestant working class. And, like Sinn Fein, they've made a difference not only to the substance and tone of negotiations but to the prospects of success in the long run.
Not only the accents but the hopes and fears of David Ervine, David Adams, Billy Hutchinson, Gusty Spence and Gary McMichael have become familiar to audiences in the Republic for whom the tones and attitudes of Ian Paisley once represented monolithic unionism.
That brave man Paisley, as W.R. Rodgers described him, in a memorable poem:
Eyeless/In Gaza, with a daisy-chain of millstones/Round his neck; groping like blind Samson/For the soapy pillars and greased poles of lightning/To pull them down in rains and borborygmic roars/Of rhetoric. (There, but for the grace of God/Goes God.) Rodgers, writing in the mid1960s, was prescient and humane: I like his people and I like his guts/But I dislike his gods who always end in gun-play.
What's needed most from the new or potential arrangements, in the North, between North and South and in these islands, is an end to gun-play and anything that might be deemed to excuse it.
Not that the forces now waiting offstage find it necessary to excuse their actions: their appeal is to history and the dead generations.
And the most effective answer to this appeal is the decision of nationalist and unionist politicians to work together, especially when those who've taken that decision include impressive leaders on either side who've tasted and rejected the attractions of force.