They don't know each other. One is an elderly man, a former British army officer, whose well-to-do background in Northern Ireland manufacturing is manifested in his fine Victorian villa. The other is young, and comes from working-class inner-city east Belfast. Yet they choose the same precedent to explain why they're voting No.
"I don't believe the RUC and the security forces should be interfered with," the former officer says in his sitting-room, over China tea and lemon cake. "I was on the North-West Frontier when there was all the trouble between India and Pakistan. I've seen what anarchy is."
And on the other side of Belfast the younger man says: "My father was in India after the war on peacekeeping duties. He saw what rabble-rousing does."
The terrorists "won't go away until they're beat," the older man says. "And that means mass internment."
The young man sees it from his perspective, as an unemployed person, who walks everywhere and is streetwise. "The paramilitaries are cockahoop," he says. "All the protection rackets in the city are run by them. They've had meetings, you know, dividing the place into spheres of influence."
Are IRA leaders just racketeers? "The educated ones are the officer class. They tell the scum what to do. In my area the place is run by low-life petty criminals who have evolved into so-called loyalist paramilitaries." Both these No voters are Protestants and support the Union, and Michael Stone is as repellent to them as murderer-heroes on the other side.
The young man sees the paramilitaries as becoming even more powerful if the agreement is put in place. "The largest party here is the Ulster Unionist Party. It bumbles along in its own way, and such as it is it provides a form of stability. But I can see it splitting."
And if so, the least privileged areas, like east Belfast, will bear the brunt of renewed conflict. "The Northern Ireland middle class have abdicated," he says. "An educated Palestinian shows solidarity with a Palestinian guerrilla. Not here. It doesn't matter to the Malone Road or Helen's Bay whether this thing works or not." The working-class areas have been sacrificed.
But looking out on his lawns and trees on the same Malone Road, the ex-army officer certainly does care. His No vote comes from hope betrayed, not from hopelessness. He was always looking for some way to influence things. He tried the Conservative Party in Northern Ireland around 1990.
"I remember old Paddy Mayhew at a meeting in the hotel in Hillsborough. He said he'd never talk to the IRA." But he did, and so did all the leaders. They reneged on every promise, in his view, and they are reneging on the Mitchell Principles at this moment, by allowing "punishment" beatings to go on.
Above all, they are bringing forward the release of prisoners. "I cannot bend the law to let them out within two years," he says. "I cannot. Why should you get more favourable treatment for murdering, say, Ian Gow, than for murdering your wife or your husband?" The special treatment for political prisoners enrages him. "I'm in the No camp because I believe in justice," he says with fervour.
But the fervour is not just for an abstract justice. His gentle wife is outside playing with the dog. Later, the veneer of comfortable domesticity falls away when she shows me the deep gouges in her back and her arm.
A bullet passed through her shoulder when, driving along a peaceful road, she was caught in an IRA attack on a police car which happened to be in front of her. A nurse on her way to work braved the gunfire to get to her as she sank, already unable to see, towards death. The nurse was a Catholic.
This household's No votes have little to do with constitutional issues. They have nothing to do with the South. The older man has "fished in Ballinahinch, and on the Bandon. And our old Nanny used to take us down to Dublin."
The east Belfast man has worked in the Republic. He likes the place. He may not understand its nuances. He says about Mary Robinson shaking hands with Gerry Adams, "Well, Spring must have ordered her to do it. Because your president is just a puppet of government, isn't she? She's like the queen - she can't shake hands just with whoever she likes."
These No votes are products of the years of local violence, experienced daily on the streets of his own part of the city by the younger man, and ripping through the life of the older man and his wife, insulated from it as the couple may have seemed to be. They are saying No because of local murder, local vengeance, and the response of the guardians of law and justice to local pressures.
"I think there was a basis for a settlement in the peace talks," the young man says. "But the whole thing has ended up boxing Trimble into a corner. His neck depends on a Yes vote and on decommissioning. He'll get the Yes vote. But what about decommissioning? Will his neck survive that?"