The SDLP deputy leader, Seamus Mallon, summed up the meaning of the referendum result at the King's Hall, Belfast, when he said it was no longer a case of Ulster Says No but "the North of Ireland Says Yes".
Most of them did anyway - 71 per cent, the same figure as in last week's Irish Times/MRBI poll. There was a surge towards supporting the agreement in the last 10 days of the campaign. Perhaps if polling day was this week, the Yes vote would have been up to 75 or 76 per cent, definitively settling the argument with the Democratic Unionist Party which has maintained that a 26 per cent No vote would mean a majority of unionists were opposed to the agreement.
There is a great deal of hairsplitting going on about the meaning of the almost 29 per cent No result. The dispute began even before the vote was announced. It was not so much a case of "getting your retaliation in first" as "getting your interpretation in first".
Whether or not an actual majority of unionist voters opposed the agreement, it is undeniable that the unionist community is split down the middle. The imponderable is whether the No voters will be demoralised by the scale of the Yes victory. Certainly David Trimble was the one who looked like the winner at the count. But he must know as well as anyone that there are hard battles ahead. Political insiders say Trimble will be quite ruthless with those who let him down during the referendum campaign but that he still needs Jeffrey Donaldson and the latter will be treated with kid gloves.
The outlook for a constructive, workmanlike Northern Ireland Assembly is not particularly good. In addition to the outright opponents of the agreement - the Democratic Unionist Party and Mr Robert McCartney's UK Unionists - there are bound to be different degrees of commitment to the agreement within the UUP group in the Assembly. The DUP and UKUP will be seeking to put the maximum pressure on UUP waverers. Mr Trimble will need to be both cunning and tough on the issue of candidate selection and, once the Assembly is elected, his party group will have to be tightly disciplined.
Before the election campaign has even started, seasoned observers are in despair over the bitterness that will surface. That bitterness will mainly be seen on the unionist side and words like "Lundy" and "traitor" will fly like hailstones. There are other tensions in the unionist family. The Orange Order took a different stance on the agreement from the UUP leadership and the party's deputy leader John Taylor has revived the idea that the formal link between the two should be severed. There are elements in the Orange Order which feel the same way.
In the background there is the looming prospect of another stand-off at Drumcree this year. The march is scheduled for July 5th and there is no sign at this stage that the crisis will be resolved. The imminence of Drumcree will exacerbate tensions in an election that will be severely fraught to begin with.
On the nationalist side, the SDLP is resisting Sinn Fein calls for a formal electoral pact. The bigger party will probably advise supporters to transfer to other candidates who support the agreement. Sinn Fein will continue to stress the need to maximise the number of nationalist seats and that controversy will probably continue until polling day and beyond.
The issue of the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons dominated the referendum campaign and will undoubtedly be a major focus of attention in the run-up to the election. Sources close to Provisional republican thinking emphasise strongly that there will be no decommissioning, especially not of the token variety, in the foreseeable future.
There may come a time, well down the road, when the process which the Provisionals call demilitarisation will begin. That would entail the parallel and simultaneous winding down of the military capacity of paramilitary groups and the security forces. Unilateral decommissioning just isn't on, Provisional sources insisted last night. Sinn Fein will be seeking places on the Assembly executive based on its electoral support and nothing else. The Provisionals believe that handing-over even a small quantity of weapons and explosives would undermine their demand to be treated like any other party.
Provisionals believe Mr Trimble has impaled himself on the decommissioning hook and will have great difficulty getting off it, especially in view of the fact that pressure to take a strong stance on the issue will increase during the election campaign.
Meanwhile, outside the political process, dissident republican paramilitaries can be expected to do everything in their power to hinder what they see as moves to copperfasten partition. Their success-rate has been low: the Garda Siochana seems to know virtually every move in advance. Their strength is estimated at 20 to 30 active service volunteers or only about one-tenth of the core membership of the Provisionals. The new organisation's weaponry is said to be limited and there are reports that a number of dummy weapons were used in a recent unsuccessful operation. The political climate for the dissidents is not favourable and it is probably the case that only the use of insensitive and brutal methods to suppress them would change that.
On the broad political stage, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern have reason to feel pleased with themselves. The Yes vote for the agreement in the Republic was very impressive but there was a relatively poor turnout, reflecting the low level of campaigning by some of the political parties. The northern vote was a tribute to Mr Blair and Mr Trimble. Public opinion in the Republic wrote off Trimble after his handin-hand victory celebration with the Rev Paisley at Drumcree in 1995, failing to understand that unionists, like most other politicians, feel obliged to play to the gallery of their constituents from time to time. Mr Blair is expected back in Northern Ireland this week to savour his triumph. Nobody can say he didn't work hard for it.