Despite the bitter taste of sectarianism, Belfast is slowly developing a Europan flavour, writes Gerry Moriarty.
Little things are the giveaways of the contrast between now and then, between war and relative peace. Bring friends or relations on a trip through Belfast, the war tour in the holiday months of July and August; the usual runaround: the Falls, the Shankill, the peace walls, the murals, Stormont - it just doesn't have the same edge as a decade ago.
In slow traffic you're muttering to yourself: "There's another of those confounded big red city-tour double-deck buses clogging up traffic again."
But wait a minute, they are real live tourists on that bus. Ten years ago you were bumper to bumper because of the bomb alerts.
And what am I hearing on the car radio? On the BBC, the former RUC Special Branch officer Bill Lowry civilly disagreeing with Danny Morrison, the IRA man he helped arrest 10 years ago and jail for eight years.
And that's the futuristic Waterfront Hall we're passing, and the Lagan Weir, and the giant Odyssey Arena and all those riverside apartments and houses. No doubt but Belfast is looking smarter with its new focus on the Lagan. And the lively pubs, and that phenomenon that has even reached Belfast - all those coffee shops. And when the sun shines, people sitting at pavement tables, sipping cappuccinos and lattes, imagining themselves as Continentals in this old redbrick (still) sectarian city.
Back in early 1994, the job of Belfast-based Irish Times reporters was grim but simple: it was chiefly covering violence. There were incipient signs that there might be a political way out of the almost "acceptable level" of viciousness that seemed to be Northern Ireland's lot, but late night call-outs to the latest murder or bombing in Tyrone or Armagh or Belfast was the journalist's main beat.
Recent years have been frustrating writing about the start-stop nature of politics here, but look at it in any light and Northern Ireland is now a far better place. Most importantly, we are dealing with jaw jaw, not war war. Negotiations next month should ferry us further towards what passes for normal society.
They might not conclude matters, but the deal-makers, Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson, are making the right noises in recent articles in this newspaper.
When you flash back 10 years and beyond you can't but wonder and feel sorrow at the futility of it all.
July and August 1994 was a period of hope. Through those months, there were good grounds for believing the IRA would call a ceasefire. Gerry Adams and the then Taoiseach Albert Reynolds were hinting as much, and so was the IRA. Much of the groundwork was completed. There was Hume-Adams, whose seeds went back as far as 1988. There was the Downing Street Declaration of 1993 and that crucial line about Britain having "no selfish, strategic or economic" interest in Northern Ireland.
But it took some time and considerable political sacrifice - particularly from the SDLP - and courage - particularly from Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Albert Reynolds and John Major - before it could be translated into the tricky peace.
In the meantime, for the IRA and the INLA and the loyalist paramilitaries back then, there was the usual business to be done. Through July and August 1994 17 people died violently: six were killed by the IRA, five by the UDA, four by the UVF and two by the INLA. In the holiday months this year we had trouble at Ardoyne on the Twelfth and, in terms of major trouble, that was it.
It's not to engage in sexism to note that two of those 17 victims were women. Remember Caroline Moreland? A 34-year-old separated mother of three young children from the Falls area of west Belfast. The IRA said she was an informer. Its members dumped her body on the Fermanagh border, near Roslea, a death that conjured memories even then of the death of Jean McConville in 1972 - the informer label on both women ensuring their own community did not properly mourn them.
And Kathleen O'Hagan? Billy Wright's then mid-Ulster UVF brigade were blamed for her murder. She was seven months pregnant when her killers broke into her country home at Creggan, near Cookstown, Co Tyrone. Her husband was the intended target but he was out attending a family reunion that night. For hours before he returned home, four of her five children, the eldest eight - can you imagine it? - sat huddled and bereft around her body.
Where in that was there glory for God, Queen, Ireland or Ulster? But that was Northern Ireland 10 years ago: a couple of killings a week and many more injured, and sometimes multiple slaughter such as at Teebane, Greysteel, the Shankill and Loughlinisland.
Explaining it all as one side campaigning violently for a united Ireland and the other responding violently to prevent it - with the police and British army in the middle acting within and sometimes without the law - carries a rough truth. But maybe Cardinal Tomas Ó Fiaich was closer to the mark when he said that there was a tendency among Protestants to be religiously sectarian and Catholics to be politically sectarian.
Even now, with all the progress and the genuine search for reconciliation, in darker moments you wonder is the core of the problem that history has forged Northern Ireland into a hard, unforgiving place.
Yet 10 years ago people were war-weary. The Troubles were running a quarter of a century. Were we in for a 30-year war? A 100-year war? Ahead of the speculation of a cessation there were periods when the conflict seemed destined to grind on interminably despite the logic that it shouldn't:by the early 1990s the IRA and the British had both conceded that neither could defeat the other.
But then, finally and monumentally, on Wednesday August 31st, 1994, the IRA issued its statement saying that, from midnight, "there would be a complete cessation of military operations" and all its units were "instructed accordingly". Now there was a day of hope and joy. The purist republicans were appalled, and are still appalled, but most republicans were glad the war was ending.
A month and a half later, on October 13th, the loyalist paramilitaries expressed remorse for their killings and declared ceasefires.
Before the ceasefires, based on Irish Times figures compiled over the length of the Troubles and from the Lost Lives book, more than 3,500 died in the conflict going back to 1969. About 900 died in the 10 years before the cessations, and about 190 in the 10 years to now, the majority killed by loyalists. And that includes Omagh and feuding and turf wars - killings that are criminal rather than in any sense political - and the 17-month period from February 1996 to July 1997 when the IRA went off ceasefire.
By those figures the last 10 years certainly are an imperfect peace, and an armed peace, to quote Bertie Ahern, but they denote that Northern Ireland, falteringly, is retreating from war.
The IRA ceasefire of 1994 did for Sinn Féin what many said it would do: win it legitimacy and votes and eventually allow it surpass the SDLP in strength - a price that John Hume and Seamus Mallon were prepared to pay if it purchased the peace.
In the June European election of 1994, a couple of months before the cessation, Sinn Féin won 10 per cent of the vote. In the Forum election two years later it won 16 per cent, and its vote has been rising ever since.
"The reason Sinn Féin is doing well is because of the peace not the war," a former senior IRA leader conceded when the votes graph started heading upwards. Others asked why it took 25 years to see that truth.
On the socio-economic front, Northern Ireland has improved dramatically. Unemployment is just over 5 per cent. Belfast, Derry and other towns are benefiting from British and European largesse. Social life is lively; the pubs are full; the restaurants offer haute cuisine.
The middle-classes, who in many ways had the money and the means to isolate themselves from the Troubles, are still faring well with their holiday homes in Donegal and on the Continent. Sectarianism, though, will be with us for a long time, and so will crime that has evolved from the Troubles.
There is also a developing underclass, primarily in loyalist areas, who could rise up to threaten the comfortable and complacent. Resolving policing is crucial.
And there's still great suffering endured by the thousands of the bereaved, the maimed and injured - and also by some of the killers who in the dark hours question were their deeds justified.
Some brave souls have sublimated that pain in politics or peace or counselling or charity work. Others haven't been able. How to deal with this terrible legacy of the Troubles is a huge issue. It is a slow work in progress.
Unionist distrust and republican Machiavellianism haven't made the last 10 years easy politically but - and here's the value of remembering - the imperfect peace so surely surpasses what went before. If the wit and will is there you would imagine that, in the Leeds Castle talks in Kent in mid-September, the politicians - mindful of what we are remembering - might bring us closer to a new watershed in Irish history.
It's odd how so many people can forget what Northern Ireland has come through and how far it has advanced. But to have some notion of the impact of the IRA ceasefire 10 years ago it's important to remember.
Indeed, it's important to remember, regardless, because the dead, the maimed, the physically and mentally wounded and the bereaved are owed that at least.