The word historic gets bandied about a lot whenever Northern Ireland is under scrutiny. It was applied to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, to the Downing Street Declaration and to a great deal that went on before, during and after the first and second ceasefires. However, the events of this week truly deserve the word.
If we move down a notch or two on the scale of gravitas, they were also very surprising. It had been fair to assume that with all the posturing the Ulster Unionists were doing in advance of the talks, what we would see was a case study in how to eject Sinn Fein from the table. To find that such was not the objective was a surprise, albeit a very welcome one.
The second reasonable assumption was that decommissioning, which had been the stumbling block up to now, would prove to be an insurmountable obstacle to progress. Instead, what we are seeing is its repositioning as a matter to be managed in a way that will allow substantive talks to get under way.
This repositioning of an apparently intractable issue reminds me of the old saying that what you see depends on where you're standing. A political variant of that might be: what you see depends on the size of the majority on which you're sitting. The Tory government in recent years was sitting on so small a majority that John Major was but a few inches off the floor.
From that angle, decommissioning looked like a mountain. Tony Blair's majority, on the other hand, is sizeable enough to give him a sense that the thing is of manageable height. Which is not to say that it is numbers alone which have empowered Tony Blair and Mo Mowlam. It is my personal belief that Mo Mowlam empowers Mo Mowlam - but more on that a little later.
Numbers, however, did play a major part in the performance of the Tory government in the last year or so. It is hard, in retrospect, to judge whether the small majority it owned was a reason or an excuse.
The Tories may have been eager to move forward but were crippled by the numbers, or they may have been glad that the numbers allowed them to avoid going down a road contrary to their natural scheme of things.
Either way, there was so little in the way of action that a myth grew up about "immovable objects" like decommissioning, which are now being dealt with courageously and with common sense. The Ulster Unionists have been showing commendable amounts of both.
This can be looked upon either as a genuine conversion or as a response to the clanging closed of a back door always, up to now, left open behind them. I believe it to be a positive, pragmatic move and applaud it. More power to them. More power to everybody involved.
The new British government has a commendable sense of deadline which may -with luck - kill off that deadly phrase "the talks process" with its implications of a purposeless continuing activity without productivity. Now what's in question is talk to a purpose and with deadlines. That matters, not only to the end-result of the talks north of the Border, but to the attitude of people south of the Border.
An interesting and not insignificant sidelight to the presidential campaign is the recurring complaint on the late-night talk shows that "we don't want someone from `up there' as our president".
This betokens no heartlessness in the South to the troubled realities to be coped with in the North: witness the never-ending emotional response to atrocities in the North when a ceasefire was not in effect. There is no lack of care when real people are really hurt.
But there is an impatient intolerance for what seems (to many people in the South) to be a self-indulgent ritual of tired debate never reaching a conclusion. It would greatly encourage people in the South to come to a real understanding of Northern issues if this tired debate were swept aside by the new urgency being brought to the discussions by both governments and, it would seem, by all interests in the North.
Sharing with Lady Bracknell a conviction that "my first impressions of people are invariably right", and having had an overwhelmingly positive first impression of Mo Mowlam, I was nonetheless, as many people were, deeply shaken by her shaky start. The planning of the marches floored me. It did not seem to fit with what we knew of her. Indeed, it seemed as if the new administration was going to do little more than what the Tories did.
It seemed such a profound misstep that it would have been easy for Mo Mowlam to lose confidence and become tentative and self-preservingly cautious. Instead, she quickly proved she had shaken it off and moved ahead. The impetus Mowlam set was matched by the Irish Government.
Of course, every decisive step, positively intended, in this area has an immediate downside. It comes back to where you are standing. From our point of view in the South, John O'Donoghue's move yesterday to free republican prisoners seems an eminently positive response to progress. From another point of view, it can be portrayed as negative.
Indeed, the very progress made has already empowered some unionists (sadly, even within Trimble's own party) to express open hostility to what is happening.
That said, the reality is that David Trimble is in a relatively strong position. He does not face elections for some time, and has strong support from loyalists in moving forward. In addition, there are strong indications that he had given his word to Tony Blair that measurable progress would be made in time for the Labour Party conference in the Britain.
If the Tories were a strong opposition, there would be fertile ground for men like Ian Paisley but, with the Tories at their weakest in decades, he faces a grim choice. He can do high-profile dancing on the sidelines or he can find a way to get inside the tent. Dr Paisley, despite the theatrics, is a brilliant analyst of possibilities and he will be well aware that old-style ranting in the present context will have limited efficacy.
The real task now is to do business, to establish a business committee to work out nuts and bolts. A lot of work is already happening in bilateral meetings.
Mo Mowlam, meanwhile, has brought a driving informality to the process which takes a bit of getting used to, even by those on her own side. However, she is now seen by most people as an honest broker who knows what she's at.