If there is a peace dividend that has gone tragically unreported, it is the abandonment of the traditional walkabout by a new Northern Secretary.
Shaun Woodward arrived back at Stormont yesterday where, he reminded us, he began his ministerial career. Thankfully there was little fanfare, and mercifully there was no shopping centre visit as his predecessors have chosen.
Peter Hain famously went "to meet the people" in downtown Belfast - a dicey tactic at the best of times. John Reid, who has excellent man-of-the-people skills, took himself off to Forestside shopping centre in the south of the city to press the flesh. Paul Murphy opted for a mall in Bangor where he bought nothing and narrowly avoided getting his photo taken with a lingerie department in the background.
All visits involved a posse of camera crews walking backwards, clicking away as the new man awkwardly pretended they weren't there.
Mr Woodward, who married into the Sainsbury family, instead wisely opted to avoid the retail sector altogether. He could have gone to a tobacco-free pub for his first formal press conference - he was the author of the North's smoking ban - but he modestly chose instead the recently tarted-up foyer of a civil service building at Stormont.
Arriving at the microphones the best part of an hour late, the new man was somewhat upstaged by Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde, who offered the best news lines in what turned out to be something of a slowish day at. He told us he had no specific intelligence linking the terror "critical alert" to Northern Ireland. Times have changed.
Mr Woodward, of course, now heads a slimmed-down Northern Ireland Office ministerial team and he set out his priorities for the time ahead.
First among these was a stated intention to devolve yet more power to the Paisley-McGuinness Executive. Under the terms of the St Andrews Agreement, the fledgling Stormont government is in line to receive policing and justice powers from the NIO next year.
Sinn Féin is particularly keen on this, while some in the DUP say it will take a political lifetime for it to come about.
The man in the middle is Woodward, who, having witnessed something of a minor miracle at Stormont already, appears to have some grounds for basing his optimism.
If he succeeds he could establish something of a first - an enhanced political career founded on the demise of his government department.