Gerry Adams's afternoon offer of freedom of conscience to republicans to vote as they like on May 22nd, North and South, enabled southern Sinn Feiners with reservations about the Belfast Agreement to save face.
But yesterday's ardfheis, with its emphasis on the sacrifices of the years of conflict and especially the emotional reception accorded to the visiting republican prisoners, was a triumph for the Northern contingent which has prosecuted the initial phase of the struggle. The occasional voice raised against amending Articles 2 and 3 sounded hollow and faint-hearted in the wake of the blind emotion which had greeted Martina Anderson, Geraldine Ferrity and the Balcombe Street prisoners.
For all the near unanimity, never was it more obvious how fragmented the republican agenda has become since the present conflict began three decades ago. That the supposedly irredentist Northern elements were advocating the dismantling of what might have been thought core values, while the case for these values was made mainly by southerners, provided many ironies and conundrums.
Clearly, Irish republicanism has reached a point when it needs to reconsider every one of its most cherished assumptions.
These circumstances are profoundly connected to the extent that the present shape and character of the Provisional movement reflects not just the Northern focus of the conflict but to a degree the abandonment of Irish nationalism by a majority in the Republic. There was a strong sense yesterday of Northern republicans standing on their record of sacrifice and commitment, and posing silent but pointed questions to the actually existing Republic in which they were convened.
There was also a subliminal sense that we may have reached the end of Sinn Fein's capacity to pursue the Irish unity goal on its own, and that from now on it will need to forge alliances within the broader nationalist community down south.
There is, needless to say, potential for controversy on the precise meaning of Irish unity in 1998. For most of the eight decades since partition it has been assumed, not least in the Republic, that the central aim of Irish republicanism was to unite Ireland under a single government, presumably ruling from Dublin.
But this does not seem to have been on any Sinn Fein minds for some time. Yesterday, as always, there was ritualistic mention of the goal of a 32-county socialist republic, but nobody slowed down long enough to explore what this might mean.
The crossroads at which Sinn Fein now finds itself is as much a philosophical as a tactical junction. It is arguable that, in the day-to-day pursuit of the struggle, speaking to the situation as it developed, and to an agenda laid down by others, republicans have often lost sight of the broader philosophical dimension.
Not even the party's leadership will go to great lengths to deny that, just as Southern nationalists might be said to have only a tenuous grasp on the realities of life in the Northern ghettos, Sinn Fein itself has not been good at speaking to the surviving embers of republicanism outside its own ghettos. Although sharp as a tack when it came to prosecuting the tactical war with unionism or the British government, the Provisionals were in other respects old-fashioned and unresponsive, too preoccupied with day-to-day matters to provide the much-needed backbeat for any renewal of Irish national self-definition.
Time was changing the climate in which the struggle was happening, but the waging of the war distracted everyone from the fact that the meaning of the putative Irish unity had altered out of all recognition. Some internal critics say Sinn Fein does not have a policy on unity, but only on the issue of ending British occupation, which is far from being the same thing. This is probably not surprising, since there is hardly anyone left alive on the island capable of defining what unity might mean in an Ireland in which the EU has made huge inroads into the sovereignty which should be at the core of such a question.
Does a united Ireland still mean an all-Ireland socialist republic and, if so, in what context might such a project be pursued in the light of the scarcity of support for it on either side of the Border? Does unity mean the North joining the South, or vice versa?
Would a united Ireland be ruled from Belfast, Dublin, or someplace else? Are we talking about, for example, a future 32-county republic with a Fine Gael Taoiseach and a Democratic Left Tanaiste? And so on. "This is certainly not a struggle for a 32county free state, or whatever you might call it," one key republican strategist declared. "The next phase will involve change all over the country." This change, said another, is a question of transformation, and will involve a politics which moves beyond the national question.
"We don't want anything taking over anything," he said. "We want power given back to people in their communities, power devolving to the lowest possible level. This is the best way of getting around the nationalist-unionist dichotomy".
That the armed struggle is almost certainly over is implicit in all recent republican statements, and yet such guarantees cannot be absolute. Undoubtedly, if the continued progress of the process could be assumed, we will have heard the last of the IRA guns. And yet, even the most moderate of republicans will not concede the surrender of the strategy which they consider has enabled them to pursue their agenda in a way political activity alone could not.
"Until you have demilitarisation," said one senior Sinn Feiner, "the IRA will continue to exist. In other words, it is not so much that the IRA is refusing to permanently leave down its weapons, but that it will not yield the prerogative to remain, as a recent statement put it, mindful of its "responsibilities". In the meantime, as one activist conceded, "it's quite possible that there might be no armed struggle at all, and weapons could be rusting away in dumps".
The question is: will this provide a sufficient basis for reuniting the broader republican family to face the next phase of the struggle?