I don't know why it was so touching, but it was, to look around the cinema in Belfast and see the kind of people who had come to watch Titanic. Elderly couples, they were. When did you last see a cinema full of people that age? What can they have made of this young person's adventure story? What brought them out?
What had they thought they would see in the film that would be about themselves, or would affirm them in some way, or tell their real history? What was in their heads?
What is inside people's heads is the thing that matters in Northern Ireland. The issues, by world standards, aren't that intractable. But the people are. So, at least, we are told.
How does an outsider get a glimpse of the landscapes inside those heads? I said on Ulster Television that I had come to live in the North, and knew very little about it, and a variety of people rang in from all over Northern Ireland, some to rebuke me for ignorance or prejudice, but some to invite me to their places.
One message from a woman in Co Armagh read: "Nuala is welcome to stay with my family for a week/couple of days - I would be afraid to go south - as a Protestant I mightn't be accepted - like her to see how we live - come to the country, not Belfast - life is good in the villages."
So I went. And when I came away, after a perfectly normal and undramatic day of listening and talking to men and women, Protestant and Catholic, what had most struck me was how little the people I'd met matched anything I was hearing through the media.
They have hardly been touched by the Troubles. But then - for every bomb that goes off in one place, exhaustively reported by the media, there are 10,000 places where a bomb didn't go off.
They don't really know why the Troubles ever started: relationships between Presbyterians, Church of Ireland people and Roman Catholics in that area have been stable for generations, and though the Catholics are indeed bottom of the heap when it comes to land and money, that seems to anyone I met no more an adequate cause for war than, say, the fact that we in the Republic have a large class of disadvantaged people would seem to anyone in the Republic an adequate cause for civil war.
What is more, the way things are is so solidly entrenched, it is impossible to believe - and I don't think the local people do believe - the situation is threatened by the likely outcome of any talks. The idea that the terrorists on both sides actually speak for these people became increasingly unreal as I went in and out of shops, spotless bungalows, council houses and bars.
We began in an ordinary North of Ireland village, with a good bakery, and a vegetable shop full of neat, shiny vegetables, and two pubs, and places of assembly or worship for Presbyterians, Non-Subscribing Presbyterians, Pentecostalists, Methodists, Baptists and the Church of Ireland.
THE woman who had contacted me was a countrywoman who had come into the place from a hard background, where her widowed mother knitted socks for farmers and walked from farm to farm selling them. She and her husband moved up in the world, up to working in offices.
They saved very carefully, and are comfortable now. Their only child is a few steps further up again. With her husband she runs two substantial businesses and works all the hours there are.
They are going to have as much money, if they haven't already got it, as the big Presbyterian farmers who used to be the wealthiest people in the community. There is more than political change going on.
I asked her how you get to know what is going on under the surface in a village like hers. It says in the Belfast Telegraph, for instance, that local communities in that very part of the North have been getting the artists to paint out the initials LVF on their loyalist murals and paint in UVF - the UVF ceasefire being still, comparatively speaking, intact. If this is true it seems very interesting to me. But how would an outsider find out the truth of it?
She was as surprised to be asked about paramilitaries as I would be to be asked about heroin dealers in my area of Dublin. You mind your own business, it seems, in principle, and above all you keep quiet about anything political.
"I believe that Catholic and Protestant can live together in peace. We played cricket with the kids from the Catholic housing estate when we were kids. And we all went to the same dances in the Orange Hall when we were teenagers.
"My pal came with me on the Twelfth, and I went with her on the 15th of August to Warrenpoint. And on Women's World Day of Prayer I go with my friend to her chapel. I can't speak the Mass, for I don't know how, but it was no bother to me to be there.
"But I wouldn't say that in public. They could find out where you live and come and destroy your property . . ."
Who could? "The Protestants could. Your own . . ."
Her best friend, a Catholic, living above the village in a neat bungalow in an estate so new and so middle-class that a Special Branch man lives beside a Catholic, says: "I'm 56 years old, and I have never heard a shot or seen a bomb in my life. We're the same as you - we only know what we see on the television."
What about Drumcree? "Well, a few boys from the village - hotheads - went and stood there. We know the same boys. But we aren't affected by it." "I'll tell you," the first woman says, "what the Twelfth means to me. This is what it means. My friend up at the farm will ring me up and say 'I'm digging a few of the early potatoes just for the family. Do you want some'?"
PEOPLE are local. Country people are, anyway. We sat at a fire, a Catholic woman and a Protestant woman she'd known all her life, and they told me about a stretch of the Lagan nearby where on Sunday mornings the swans flock to listen to the choir in the Church of Ireland on the hillside above.
"Sometimes when I'm watching the television about this place and all the violence in it I ask myself - are they making it up?" one of them said.
Going away that evening I could imagine the knowing voices saying that everyone I'd met that day was (a) lying to me, or (b) lying to themselves or (c) enmeshed in a situation so complicatedly untruthful and irrational that what they did sincerely believe and say has no validity. Well, we'll see.
These people have votes every bit as good as the votes of the ghettos. After the referendum, we won't know everything, but we'll know something of what is in their heads.