They had gathered in a pub to talk about their hopes and fears as the referendum approaches. They were young, Catholic, professional people, confident and modern.
You pass the little clusters of their desirable new houses coming into the pretty Co Down village. There was never a war here. But they are wary all the same. They don't all know each other and they're guarded. But the proprietor of the pub has no qualms. Scenting politics, he leans over the counter and embarks on a vigorous monologue.
"Agreement," he says sarcastically. "What agreement? Can anyone tell me what exactly has been agreed? Can anyone answer a few questions about the exact details there's supposed to be agreement on?"
He glares around, half hamming it up, half serious.
"This - thing - here," he said. "This so-called agreement - it isn't Sunningdale for slow learners. It's Stormont for slow learners."
He bustles off around the busy pub, a prophet on his own ground. "I tell you something," he calls back. "Bertie sold us down the river too quickly!"
And from then on nobody would call the Belfast Agreement an agreement.
"What has been agreed?" a young woman said. "Nothing has been agreed. What there is is a document that might - just might - be the start of a political process.
"But you have to remember this," she said, and the way she said it made contradiction impossible: "Nationalists and republicans have never, ever, been offered anything by the British that didn't turn out to be something else."
Her husband, however, married in from south of the Border, was more hopeful. "I'm going to vote in the North and in the South. I'm going to vote Yes in the North and in the South. And if I can get away with voting Yes more than once, that's what I'll be doing."
The proprietor of the pub darted back to give his opinion from time to time. "What odds will you give me that this agreement thing will fail? Go on! Go on - I'll give you five to one the whole thing will fail."
A little later he materialised at the table to say: "And that's another thing! What's the point of putting a Tory ex-minister in charge of a so-called independent commission of inquiry into the RUC?"
He went off about his work. Then he came back again. "Anyway - what about the UDR and the RIR as they call it? What about all the people they've killed? Who's going to inquire into that?"
The experiences which the seemingly privileged people around the table bring to this referendum began to come out. They are in the majority in their community, which is happily mixed. The pub had Protestant customers drinking in it, perfectly at ease with the forceful proprietor. "We're all right," the young woman said. "We're fortunate, here. But it must be terrible to be a Catholic somewhere you're completely outnumbered, like Larne or Bangor or Newtownards . . ."
A quiet woman said: "But it can be hurtful here, too. I have a close Protestant woman friend. Really close. But do you know what she said to me the other day? `You're very liberal. For a Catholic.' I couldn't believe it."
Another woman, a commercial traveller, told of how often she'd been turned away on calls with `Sorry, he's too busy to see you,' as soon as she gave her distinctively Irish name.
Everyone at the table had experienced harassment at roadblocks, just because of their names.
When it was put to them that things had improved - that, for example, loyalists couldn't bring the North to a halt in protest after this vote the way they could after Sunningdale, the young married woman all but started hissing. "Don't tell me that that's all gone. For three days I tried to get to my work, during Drumcree the year before last, and for three days I couldn't get through.
"My boss flew in from London on business and he was held hostage, virtually, in Belfast City Airport. They burned articulated lorries there, on the road at Loughbrickland, and the RUC just left them to it and diverted the traffic for them . . ."
They do not give David Trimble any credit for backing the agreement. "Who knows what Blair threatened him with?" If it comes to that, they don't trust Blair any more than they trust the unionists. So why are they voting Yes?
"Because Adams and McGuinness are still in there. That's the only thing that's keeping our hearts up," one person said. And the quiet woman said: "This is the first time I've seen educated middle-class Catholics say they'll vote for something, not because of what's in it, but because they trust the people who've asked them to vote for it. They trust Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin."
And then she added sadly, "I have to trust them myself. Because I don't like this. When Articles 2 and 3 are dumped, what will I be? I couldn't in a million years be British. But will I be Irish?"
Everyone at the table was going to vote and to vote Yes. But they were still fearful. "Drumcree will tell the tale," they all agreed. But the proprietor won't even vote. His farewell was a cheerful "It's the old unionist veto again - you wait and see."
But his friend, on a night out from his own pub across the road, didn't agree. "Remember TINA?" he said. "I see that girl everywhere. She's my girl. There Is No Alternative."
More tomorrow