It is not all over - not by a long, long chalk - but we must be that much closer to that day when it will be possible in the North to identify the day-by-day condition known as peace.
And what then? To memorialise the dead or not? If yes, selectively or totally? Is one to commemorate the terrorist killed in action with a child despatched in her pram in a random bombing? Is not any memorial stone rendered meaningless by placing in companionship Angela Gallagher, accidentally shot by the IRA when she was a couple of months old, and the Shankill Butcher Lennie Murphy, almost certainly the most wicked and depraved of all individuals in the Troubles?
Possibly. But if we have learnt one thing from the repeated veneration of political murder in this island, it is that the selective deed of commemoration shapes the popular memory. Clarity is achieved at the expense of truth, and mythic acts are minted from the commonplace squalor of the meanest murder.
Commonplace thug
We know a lot about this in Ireland. Prompted by the abysmal example of the National Graves Association, which in the past diligently sifted through mounds of corpses to identify the Righteous Ones who died for Ireland, as opposed to the Traitors who did not, we must be honest in whatever memorials are raised to the dead of the Troubles. It is disagreeable to say, but it is true: without the troubles, Lennie Murphy would probably have been no more than a commonplace thug; and without the troubles, Angela Gallagher, killed in 1971, today would be 27.
Having a single memorial for all those who died or disappeared in the Troubles does not mean the problem will go away. Communities will make memorials and myths come what may; and what are we to do with lapidary lies which extol non-existent heroism - such as the legend which adorns the grave of Lennie Murphy, "Here lies a Soldier"?
There is actually nothing we can do - now or in the past. All we can do is, generally, to leave the stones standing and ensure that the truth is told in less obsidian form; and that means repeating it time and time again, as a permanent reproach to the standing falsehood that is granite.
Which is in itself no answer. What truth will satisfy the Graham family from near Cookstown, whose three brothers were one by one tracked down and murdered by the IRA? What truth will satisfy the Reavey family of South Armagh, two of whose brothers were murdered in a single night, a third dying weeks later? How will the Grahams feel about having their family names on the same memorial that lists dead hunger-strikers or Dominic McGlinchey? How will the Reaveys feel about their boys being commemorated on the same stone that bears the names of the UVF men who killed them?
Christian charity
Possibly, in a heroic journey of Christian charity, such families can accept the mingling of names, of the doers and the done-to; but we are not all Christian - Muslims and Sikhs and at least one Jew have died in these troubles - and we are not all capable of such charity, whether Christian or otherwise. Is therefore a single memorial not likely to stir up more anger than it is worth? Is it not better to let the dead past bury itself?
Possibly it might be if the past could be relied on to do such things, but it is not so. And in the absence of a central official memorial to those who have died, there will inevitably be less formal memorials. Freelance memorialising is a little-studied branch of fiction writing which can, over time, have a larger and more enduring impact than the more conventional forms. What child brought up within the shadow of a statue of pikemen of 1798 (though it was probably erected in 1898) did not have his mind firmly fixed on how things had been at the time of that Rising by the stone heroics he daily witnessed?
On the other hand, we are extremely uneasy with memorials which are not strictly our own. The cavalcade of horse statuary in Dublin is extinct, as is Nelson's Pillar, one of the finest and most elegant memorials in these islands. The Islandbridge Memorial Gardens to the Irish dead of the Great War came close to the same end, but through neglect. After de Valera had actually refused to allow them to be formally opened, successive governments, lacking the political will to erase them, simply permitted them to become an improvised halting site and a municipal dump, rather than have to acknowledge an uncomfortable reminder of an unofficially recognised part of our history.
Stone memorials
(Paradoxically, even that memorial contains the falsehood, perpetrated initially in the unionist interest during the Troubles of 1919-23 and faithfully repeated ever since, that 49,000 Irishmen died in the Great War, when the figure was more like 35,000.)
So stone memorials are not in themselves evidence of truth, merely evidence that somebody cared enough to raise them, and in the absence of official commemorations, there will be unofficial ones.
To acknowledge the dead - all of them, the vanished and unacknowledged rotting in their secret graves, the IRA and UFF, the SAS and the INLA, the infants and the old, the dead of London, Belgium, Dublin and Germany - impartially and honestly will take courage. But that is the least that we owe them all.