What should have been exhilarating for everyone is just another excruciatingly slow step forward. What should have been a cause for celebration for constitutional politics on the whole island of Ireland is lost. What should have been a historic resumption of the Dáil, particularly for Fianna Fáil, is just another sitting day.
What should have been a belated vindication for John Hume and the SDLP, for David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party is clouded by the controversy surrounding it. It is an incontrovertible fact that the announcement of the decommissioning of IRA weapons this week is something of an anti-climax.
Why should such a historic step, the long-sought goal of nationalists and unionists alike, be seen this way?
Naturally, there is some questioning of the motivation for making the decision now. It was clearly arrived at for strategic rather than moral reasons at this time. Somewhere and sometime in the past year, Sinn Féin managed to convince the IRA that the salvation of the Belfast Agreement is more important to the republican movement than bunkers full of arms. The guns were put beyond use to maximise Sinn Féin's chances of getting into governments, North and South, in the next couple of years.
So be it. The genesis of the Hume/Adams dialogue which grew into the peace process was rooted in the belief that the IRA could be convinced that they could achieve more through politics than the barrel of a gun in this generation.
There is the more relevant question about the lack of transparency about the decommissioning events. The proposition has been put that it may have been better if the Democratic Unionist Party's nominee had been one of the two witnesses to the acts. But that is to grossly misunderstand the process in hand. The weird world of republican theology - to which we have been introduced to in the past decade - would not have allowed it. There was no way that the IRA would have handed up its guns into the arms of the DUP.
There are some home truths to be confronted by all in the days since decommissioning. Gen John de Chastelain and his international colleagues and the two clergymen had nothing to gain from exaggerating the acts which they witnessed. Their findings could be contradicted by the two reports from the International Monitoring Commission in coming months.
Dr Paisley wants to be convinced that Gen de Chastelain and his colleagues are correct in their belief that all of the IRA's arsenal has been put beyond use now. He is looking for the scale and the "numerics" of the whole exercise. The provision of photographs would not, however, prove anything. The world is awash with guns and the IRA could re-stock tomorrow. The important thing is that the IRA has acquiesced in the act of taking the gun out of Irish politics. And that was unthinkable 10 years ago.