THE comings and goings and meetings here and meetings there and forums and statements in parliaments and press briefings and general bustle that constituted the visible face of the peace process were often an empty enough sham. Still, there's a sad void where they used to be.
This is a most uneasy period. We are as helpless as children waiting to know the whim of a patriarch. Somewhere today in some bungalow in Monaghan or Tyrone or Armagh, the IRA leadership is drinking tea while it continues its discussion on what to do to us, to the Irish in Britain, to the British people, and to people anywhere who care about Britain and Ireland. The ratio of actors to acted upon is about 1:5 million. Absurd.
Not that they're suddenly going to see that, of course. Nor the sons and nephews and nieces coming after them. Nor those on the nationalist side who believe that all they ever got they got through the fact and threat of violence. Nor those who are sure that Stormont would be back tomorrow if they were to drop their ultimate guard.
There really is no ready solution. The best the other powers involved can do is to patiently reform existing Irish structures and institutions and use the very depth of their imaginations to create new ones. This is the answer to the "otherness" each community on this island imposes on other communities. It is also the statement we need to make as a matter of practicality as we enter the 21st century. But is anybody at all doing anything on these lines? Or does politics consist of waiting to see what the IRA does next?
The experienced civil servants, politicians, academics and journalists who specialise in Northern Ireland are worth listening to. Yet perhaps some role will be played in the shaping of the island's future by the views of the person in the southern street, such as myself. And when I try to think about the future of Ireland, I put my trust in reformed structures and institutions island wide.
Perhaps they would be tried first in the areas of agriculture and tourism, then in education and health, then in security and justice. Creeping cooperation, you might call it. Nothing at all to do with sovereign allegiances and so forth - simply a radically new kind of interplay between Dublin, Westminster and Northern Ireland, called forth by the radical difficulty of the problem we share.
And then I realise that I'm talking pie in the sky. We haven't even defined, for the purpose of changing them, the societies involved. What is this Republic that offers itself as part of a future island scenario? And does any other player in this game truly comprehend us?
That is if we're allowed to think of ourselves as playing a part. David Trimble affects to believe that a wall can be erected behind which he and his followers, and his million or so fellow northerner who have the misfortune to share a homeland with him but are not his followers, can hide from us.
Never mind that we belong to the same supra national institution, the EU.
Never mind that the North and South influence each other all the time, in a myriad of ways. Take the last few weeks. Northern beef farmers came very close to asking to be Irish rather than British when it came to exporting their meat. They had to acknowledge the fundamental fact of our shared terrain.
On another level, because of the North we in the South all but ignored the 80th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Themes and vocabularies from our own past are suppressed.
An RTE radio programme that plays past "Top Ten" hits" recently played a hit of years ago, The Lonely Woods of Upton It was shocking to hear the words "Sinn Fein" in a song. But that shock is not healthy. The skirmish at Upton happened: so did the making of songs about it and many another unlovely episode. We should be able to acknowledge that. To even acknowledge that the likes of Upton did help the South to get out from under Westminster. But what would David Trimble make of that?
He was quick off the mark with his Southbashing. No doubt there will be more of it as various electioneering unionists try to better him and John Taylor in insulting their neighbours. Where is all island institutional co operation in their scenario? Utterly out of the question. Impossible. We are the enemy South.
BUT one might begin the long process of necessary change just by saying one true thing. The Republic of Ireland is not the South enemy of the Northern majority. The which the unionist leaders conjure for their followers is a figment of their imaginations.
This South is not the South of the Arms Trial. There have been substantial changes in attitude here. To take an example - 10 years ago 70 per cent of people polled in the Republic still held the traditional aspiration of a united Ireland. That has fallen to 30 per cent (in the Irish Times/Guardian opinion poll of late February). Of course, there is a group of hysterical anti nationalists in the Dublin media who shrilly consider 30 per cent too much and who won't rest until we're all simpering fans of unionism. But 30 per cent seems reasonable to me, considering how desirable on how many fronts a united Ireland would indeed be.
It was not altogether the progress of events in the North itself that changed our attitudes to it. The Republic has changed all round. When thoughtful Irish Catholics, in private and in silence, simply refused Rome's teaching on birth control, it was the end of the old Ireland. It was all the more striking a discrimination because the practice of religion is still so loved and respected. It was unthinking obedience to Rome that the popular Protestant bigotry claimed as defining the South. Unthinking obedience is over.
We are not "backward". We are not poor, though a great many of our citizens are. We are not hidebound: the electorate does surprising things, i.e., in electing Mary Robinson and in shading the vote in favour of divorce.
I could multiply examples. But it is obvious, to anyone whose perceptions are not wilfully distorted, that the Republic of Ireland is not a society to recoil from. It is plainly becoming more pluralist. Even on the political level, coalition governments are of necessity more inclusive than their single party predecessors. The old order changes. Blaneyism, to name but one seemingly immutable fact, is finished.
If north of the Border we had Denmark or Holland or Catalonia or New England, there would be cultural differences between both sides. Yet there would also be co operation to the point where the island functioned almost as a single administrative and economic unit. Nothing else makes sense for a so small a population in so homogeneous an environment.
But we are represented as hateful to Northerners to fit the old patterns in their heads. Well, we're not hateful. Far from it - they're lucky to have us as neighbours. Government spokesmen can't say that but the person in the street can. Let's start from saying it.