Twenty-five years ago we were sure we knew what Ireland would be like as we entered the 21st century. With the turn of the century in sight, the only certainty is that we were wide of the mark then and we're unlikely to be more reliable now.
Of course, we imagined that we'd enjoy what must now seem modest prosperity, paid for by our natural resources - land, oil, minerals and gas - with a little help from the Common Market.
We had little hope of wine and roses: none of houses costing millions, cars costing tens of thousands and economists complaining of a shortage of labour.
We expected social change - at a snail's pace, given the Gilbertian difficulties we'd had with contraception. (And that was before we were offered an Irish solution to an Irish problem: condoms on prescription for married couples.)
Some forecast, few seriously expected, a more shattering change, the breakdown of confidence in church, State and business; all undermined, not by planned subversion, but by the activities of some of their most vociferous proponents.
But the problem that everybody recognised, and firmly believed would be no more than a memory by now, still stubbornly defies resolution. We were sure it couldn't last, but we were wrong there, too.
Twenty-five years ago the Northern conflict was at its height. The campaigns of the Provisional IRA and loyalist paramilitaries sent waves of terror from street to street.
Hopes raised by the power-sharing executive, agreed at Sunningdale, were dead. And it was beginning to look as if we'd have to wait a long time for another chance.
But if commentators had said the chance would fall to another generation, no one would have wanted to believe them. This, they'd have been reminded, would take us to the turn of the century.
It did. But the chance has come: it's because they want the Northern parties to take it that Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern are now trying to convince their leaders that a solution is in their hands.
As Seamus Mallon has said again and again, the arguments have been rehearsed. Everybody knows what's at stake and what separates those who've come to be seen as the main protagonists: Sinn Fein and the UUP.
They are divided by walls of suspicion and pride, built in the last century or before and maintained at a terrible cost, most of it paid by the working people on either side.
Everybody knows the price of failure. Loyalist militants with their pipe-bombs and republicans with their vanloads of explosives leave no doubt of that, even for those who have no memory of the terror of the 1970s.
But some in the Republic refuse to see this as anything other than an old quarrel on which there is no room for compromise, let alone recognition of the risk to democracy involved in the accommodation of violence.
MANY, including some of their opponents, saw Sinn Fein's performance in the elections, North and South, as welcome evidence of the party's increasing involvement in the democratic system.
The party itself points to its performance as evidence of a strengthening mandate, which it is. But both SF and its supporters in the media take a different view of the democratic responsibility to lift the threat of violence from others.
Instead, Sinn Fein expects the rest to join it in one of its oldest fictions, either that it has nothing to do with the Provisional IRA or that it has no influence over it.
The party considers the fiction necessary to its negotiating position, and many commentators in the Republic accept the line.
Unionists, though, refuse to forget or overlook the threat inherent in the existence of the IRA, never mind its suspected involvement in murders or beatings.
John Bruton recognises the fiction and the risks attached to playing along with it. He has written to Fine Gael councillors reminding them that the policy introduced after the 1991 elections is still in force.
There are to be no pacts with Sinn Fein until the issue of decommissioning has been resolved.
The connoisseurs of fiction in Fianna Fail have no such policy.
And in the Dail this week Bertie Ahern appeared to move in different directions in the course of a single paragraph.
"The Good Friday agreement," he said, "cannot work on the basis that there will be no decommissioning."
Fair enough. It's what he'd said on numerous occasions and to a variety of audiences since November. An armed peace is not what the electorates on this island voted for.
He was accused of supporting a unionist position because he said so. But in his Dail speech he didn't stop there.
The agreement would only work, he said, "if the institutions are established now, and if confidence is created that a process of decommissioning will be achieved under the aegis of Gen de Chastelain and in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement."
This was not quite back to the pan-nationalist front but heading that way, with a nod to Seamus Mallon's compromise on the way. John Bruton and Proinsias De Rossa were unimpressed. "You cannot be half a democrat," said Mr De Rossa. "The commitment to exclusively democratic means of all of those parties, whose members will hold ministerial office in an executive, must be absolute and beyond question."
But a half-democratic approach is what Sinn Fein has on offer. And, as I write, with Mr Blair and Mr Ahern on their way to Belfast there's no certainty as to where the governments will finally stand on that.
Indeed, given Mr Ahern's proclivity for halfway houses, uncertainty is becoming a way of life in the Republic these days. True, the State has become rich beyond our dreams, but the challenging questions this raises go unanswered.
IS this to be a state in which the gap between rich and poor grows while the gap between the major parties narrows? A society with a more complex racial mixture than we once thought possible and edgier relations with its immigrants than anyone had feared? An economy with greater disparities between technically advanced industry, much of it owned by international corporations, and services, once public, now run - at a price - by private enterprise?
Will we come to accept that we are asked to buy facilities like Telecom Eireann, which we'd believed were ours and for which we'd certainly paid? And are we satisfied that those who profit most from the change from public to private ownership are those who manage the transaction?
We seldom hear the voices of those considered outsiders until tens of thousands support Marian Harkin's position on regional policy or 800,000 sign Bono's petition on debt and the developing world.
And some people are never heard: last month I was given a book of illuminations from the Centre for Independent Living Writers' Workshop. It's called A Light at the End . . . and it has a stirring foreword by Christy Moore:
"Some of the words and feelings written here have been locked away in a dark, hidden place behind uncaring walls. The men and women at CIL and their comrades around the world are now knocking down these walls and their light is beginning to shine on us all. Hear these words and learn to look the writers in the eye."
I was reading the book when a woman from CIL showed up on Joe Duffy's radio programme. She was commenting on the story of a 23-year-old confined to hospital for no better reason than that she suffers from cerebral palsy and a personal assistant is not available.
Knocking down walls and building hope from the rubble is a wholesome but neglected task in our prosperous world.