The images crowd in. Some hopeful, some ambiguous, some deeply tragic. There was Good Friday: John Hume lifting his hands to heaven like a saint of old who has proved to the doubters that miracles really do happen; David Trimble emerging from Castle Buildings in a state of high excitement, having done the deal and sealed his political fate for good or ill; complete strangers hugging each other in the streets of Belfast - we have peace!

Mostly the images are ambiguous, ambivalent and uncertain. Those press briefings after a session of the talks where spin-doctors of one or other stripe dropped hints that maybe progress was being made - "but don't quote me on that!" The endless obfuscation as well as the overuse of diplomatic and political code-words in documents, press statements, answers to reporters' questions. What the hell is going on? Is there anyone here who doesn't speak with a forked tongue?

Most powerful of all perhaps are the tragic images. That terrible week after Omagh when the funerals culminated in a dignified but emotionally-searing memorial service in the town centre. There was no weeping, wailing or gnashing of teeth, but the number of people who fainted in the crowd told its own story.

Around this time last year there was deep gloom at the heart of the peace process. The talks had come a cropper on the thorny issue of the northern assembly. The unionists needed it; Sinn Fein didn't want it; there were conflicting signals from the SDLP. I remember asking George Mitchell at a pre-Christmas press conference if he was putting a brave face on disaster.

Well, he was and he wasn't. No doubt he felt discouraged at the lack of progress while at the same time being sustained by the conviction that there was a way out of this tragic situation. Mitchell was the security blanket of the peace process all the way to Good Friday: he was a hard act to follow and he ain't been followed yet.

There may have been stalemate in the political process but there was plenty of violent activity on the streets. I was on my way to a party on New Year's Eve when I heard of the murder of Edmund Treanor, an innocent Catholic sitting in a bar. It was reported that a woman squealed in delight as the killers sped off in a getaway car.

The old tit-for-tat cycle of killing was back in operation. First the Ulster Democratic Party, political wing of the UDA, was expelled from the talks, then Sinn Fein. The republicans led reporters a merry dance up and down the steps of Dublin Castle and in and out of the Four Courts as they fought a political guerrilla campaign against their exclusion. It didn't save their skins but there was plenty of copy and TV footage to keep the media happy: remember Gerry Adams saying he was "absolutely pissed off"?

Another image: I am sitting in a Chinese restaurant near Dublin Castle, surrounded by 10 unionists. They are talking in low voices lest the local punters hear them: what are they afraid of? My cellphone rings, it is one of the chief demon-figures on the nationalist side of the peace process with some information to impart. The rich ambiguity of the situation is too much on top of a chop suey. I say I will call him back.

Turning from image to analysis, one of the key questions about the pact agreed on Good Friday is, where did it come from? How could a process which appeared so sluggish and unproductive suddenly give birth to the Belfast Agreement - a bonny child, at least in its first few months?

There is a clue in the parable of the man who from a distance appears to be gesticulating wildly, like someone who has lost his marbles, but on closer examination turns out to be sharpening a knife.

The process which came to fruition on Good Friday had its roots in a whole host of different areas of activity, from secretive meetings of the IRA army council to decorous dinners in Iveagh House, from sonorous press conferences in Downing Street and grand receptions in the White House to homely chats in John Hume's parlour and phone calls to reporters from various deep throats, outlining the true intentions of one or other paramilitary group.

One of the popular phrases - because there was always a catch-phrase - in the process was that Blair or Ahern or Adams or Trimble "has to get all his ducks in a row".

But it was in reality more like getting an array of battleships, aircraft carriers and destroyers into line and facing the same way. Manoeuvring each and every one of them - be it the IRA or the Ulster Unionist Party, the loyalist paramilitaries or the SDLP - into position was a Herculean task. As well as the political parties and, in some cases, their paramilitary counterparts there were the mandarins in both governments who put enormous amounts of time over many years into the effort to secure agreement.

But, as a dissident unionist reminded me recently, the agreement itself was a fudge in many respects. There's a cabinet that isn't a cabinet - at least not in the normal sense. A police commission that might give nationalists what they want - but perhaps only if it can do so without taking what unionists hold dear. And then there's decommissioning - which wasn't so much fudged as long-fingered, like a disease that can never be quite killed off, only held at bay.

AH, decommissioning. If 1997 was the year of talking dangerously, then 1998 was the year of the five-syllable D-word. A senior figure on the security side told me privately he regarded the word itself as a kind of joke. "What does it mean?" he mused. Certainly, he continued, decommissioning had limited security value - it was more important to remove the will to use weapons than the weapons themselves.

Decommissioning up to now was a word we heard only in the context of a warship that had no further use because the conflict was over. When this logic is applied to Northern Ireland it means the paramilitary weapons can be disposed of, since the war is over here too.

But here is where the ambiguity came in, because the conflict in Northern Ireland cannot be compared to, say, the first World War, which ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. Civil conflict is a ragged and uneven thing and doesn't end just because some referee somewhere blew a whistle. The IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries may have declared a ceasefire, but they and their communities still feel under threat and continue to need the comfort of knowing a weapon is available and where it is stored.

But their comfort is someone else's insecurity and the main stream unionist community in particular remained suspicious of the IRA's real intentions and would have liked at least a token gesture as an earnest of good faith. Leading unionists made decommissioning the sine qua non, the ultimate precondition for establishing an executive and letting Sinn Fein into the promised land of the North-South Ministerial Council. Voices in the unionist community which questioned the wisdom of spoiling the ship for a half-pound of Semtex were largely ignored.

A senior Irish official said the notion of partial decommissioning was devised by "securocrats" in the last Tory administration, seeking to use the peace process as a device for squeezing the IRA out of existence. But knowing the cause of the disease was not the same as finding its cure, the same way that stamping out a cigarette butt is no use after a fire has taken hold.

It got to the stage where even the most dedicated peace processers began to lose their enthusiasm, because there seemed to be nothing only the D-word. It was reliably reported that, privately, senior unionists "didn't give tuppence" about decommissioning but felt obliged to keep mouthing the formula because it was essential to keep the hardliners off their backs. Like Articles 2 and 3 in the past, the weapons issue had become a kind of obsession for unionism.

Such was the stalemate over decommissioning that it began to appear the whole process was going down the tubes. Republican pride would apparently not countenance handing over a single bomb or bullet; unionist distrust found confirmation in the knowledge that the IRA's arsenal remained intact. Republicans sneered at newspaper reports of a possible shift in the IRA's position, just as unionists publicly dismissed talk of a new formula which would promise decommissioning in the longer term without delivering weapons or bombs up-front.

Politicians and officials were at the end of their tether seeking a solution. The bright hopes raised on the day of the referendum result seemed an illusion in retrospect. The unionist middle class had come out to vote Yes, then stayed at home on the day of the Assembly elections because it was raining. Trimble's position in the Assembly was precarious, giving him very little room to manoeuvre. Meanwhile, the republican side was saying, "What part of No don't you understand?"

All the time the drums of civil conflict kept beating at Drumcree. An unforgettable image from that strife-ridden place was the sight of a British army paratrooper checking drivers' licences close to the church. These were the people who brought us Bloody Sunday: the message to the loyalist militants was all-too-clear. The deaths of the three Quinn children in that terrible fire at Ballymoney took the steam out of the Drumcree protest but only temporarily and in recent weeks it has been revived in a very determined manner. But this time last year, we had Harryville and that has died away, at least for the time being.

The year ends on a note of unease and uncertainty: nothing new in that for the people of Northern Ireland.

The optimists say the referendum vote marked a fundamental shift, a watershed in the history of the whole island and that, try as they might, the naysayers cannot turn the clock back.

The pessimists see David Trimble becoming another Brian Faulkner, marginalised into irrelevance by his dissidents. The political process collapses and the IRA and the loyalists go back on a full-time war footing.

Probably the truth is that the North will continue to muddle its way through to some kind of conclusion to the conflict, messy and untidy and probably with considerable violence along the way. Nobody will get everything they want but the will to fight for more is gradually ebbing away.

In that sense, 1998 marked the beginning of the end of the war.