Last Sunday's commitment to policing by Sinn Féin has been followed by a series of very positive statements by Gerry Adams, writes Garret FitzGerald.
These have significantly diluted the apparent conditionality of the ardfheis resolution on policing.
Against that background we can expect a positive response from Ian Paisley after, but not before, the Northern Ireland election in five weeks' time - for, in order to maximise its vote, the DUP needs to maintain until then a certain ambiguity on the timing of powersharing.
This is therefore an apt moment to place the significance of these events for our State in a historic context, especially as I believe few of our people realise the extent of the dangers that the Northern Ireland violence posed to our society in the South during the 1970s and 1980s.
Most have, I believe, now forgotten - or, in the case of some younger people, have perhaps never even heard of - the burning of the British embassy in Merrion Square by an IRA-led mob just 35 years ago on the night of the mass funeral of those who had been killed by the paratroopers in Derry. And when, nine years later, in July 1981, just after my first election as Taoiseach, a large crowd of Northern IRA supporters tried to repeat that performance in Ballsbridge (to which the embassy had by then moved), the situation there could have become highly dangerous if the gardaí had failed to hold back that mob. For, if those demonstrators had succeeded in overwhelming the gardaí and had then come into conflict with our last line of defence, the Army detachment at the embassy, lives might have been lost, which could have created a dangerously volatile situation.
In between these two Dublin crises, in 1974/75, although no one outside government was aware of the danger of a British withdrawal, it is now public knowledge that our whole island came nearer to chaos following the return to power in Britain of Harold Wilson who, during his last two years in office, sought to persuade his ministers to support such a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
At a dinner hosted by a holidaying Jim Callaghan in west Cork during August 1975, when Jack Lynch (then opposition leader) and I were also relaxing in nearby parts of west Cork, we discussed with the British foreign secretary our concern about what seemed to be the danger of such a British withdrawal. And - as we now know from British cabinet papers published last year, and from the published diary of Wilson's aide Bernard Donoghue - three months later Callaghan, backed by Denis Healey and Merlyn Rees, blocked Wilson's proposal,
The danger to our State at that time was aggravated by the fact that we in government felt unable to strengthen the Army to deal with such a possible emergency because we feared that a move of that kind would have been misinterpreted by unionists as a threat to them, rather than as a precaution against IRA violence following a British withdrawal. And that could have precipitated a pogrom of nationalists.
All those dangers now lie in the past. The Northern Ireland issue now appears to be an extinct volcano, even if the ashes have yet to grow cold. I believe that much of the credit for this outcome must go to successive Irish governments under six different taoisigh - governments which since about 1972 have done much to repair the damage that had been done by the futile anti-partition campaigns of earlier administrations in the 1950s. (In fairness, it should also be recorded that some years before the Northern Ireland crisis broke in 1968/69, Seán Lemass had also sought to moderate tensions in the North by exchanging visits with the Northern Ireland prime minister, Terence O'Neill).
When violence broke out in August 1969, neither government nor opposition here reacted sensibly, for our politicians and our civil servants were all extraordinarily ill-prepared for that crisis. But as the IRA threat became apparent, in and after the Arms Crisis year of 1970, our political parties adjusted their sights and by 1972 had identified the vital interests of our State as lying with striving to achieve peace and stability in a Northern Ireland that would remain part of the United Kingdom until and unless a majority of its people decided otherwise.
Because of Fianna Fáil intra-party tensions in the 1970s Jack Lynch could not - and in the 1980s Charles Haughey would not - publicly espouse such an approach, which in the interests of peace the opposition parties had felt it right to advocate from 1969 onwards. But by 1993, when Sinn Féin's interest in abandoning violence had become public knowledge, Albert Reynolds, as taoiseach, felt able to adopt publicly the crucial principle of "no reunification without the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland". Thenceforward this became the basis of a solidly bipartisan approach here to the achievement of peace and stability in Northern Ireland within a UK context.
The objective of all Irish governments since the early 1970s was to persuade their British counterparts to substitute a constructive policy, designed to meet legitimate nationalist grievances, in place of an often provocative and counter-productive British security-dominated approach to the North - a policy which had merely served to swing nationalist support away from the constitutional SDLP and towards Sinn Féin and the IRA.
The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement achieved the first phase of such a re-alignment of British policy. In 1986 it helped to swing electoral support back from Sinn Féin to the SDLP on a scale sufficient to encourage the abandonment of violence by the IRA. And since then British and Irish political leaders have steadily built on that breakthrough by carrying forward, with consistent Irish government support, a process of assisting the IRA to get off the hook of violence.
In fairness, tribute must be paid at this stage to the remarkable political skill with which the IRA leadership has painstakingly secured the approval of 90 per cent of its supporters for a reversal of its previous violent challenge to the very existence of Northern Ireland. Few Irish political leaders have ever had to attempt such a difficult volte-face.
However difficult and distasteful many in both North and South have found many of the compromises required by this prolonged "peace process", the fact is that this approach has offered the only way out of the recurrent violence which over many centuries had been the unhappy heritage of England's colonial engagement with Ireland.