The British army has formally disbanded its last operational brigade from Northern Ireland.
A ceremony at the army's Northern Ireland headquarters last night saw 39th Infantry Brigade lower its flag at Thiepval Barracks near Lisburn before disbandment.
Anxious not to portray the end of Operation Banner this week as a total withdrawal, the army then hoisted the flag of 38th (Irish) Brigade which has been formed and will be stationed at the barracks in readiness for deployment anywhere in the world.
Last night's event rounded off a week of notable anniversaries and what all sides in Northern Ireland hope is the conclusion of the military era.
Formal British military deployment ended at midnight on Tuesday with the ending of Operation Banner, but the week also noted the 35th anniversaries of Operation Motorman and the IRA's bombing of Claudy in 1972.
Motorman was a large-scale operation which began before dawn on July 31st, 1972. It was designed to remove all barricades and "retake" the no-go areas in republican strongholds in both Belfast and Derry. It involved some 12,000 soldiers supported by the locally recruited UDR. Two people, a Catholic teenager and a member of the IRA, were shot dead.
Later that same day, the IRA exploded three bombs in the village of Claudy, a short distance from Derry, in which nine people, five Catholics and four Protestants, died.
The outgoing general officer commanding the army in the North, Lieut Gen Nick Parker, said last night: "Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom; we have barracks across the whole of the United Kingdom, we need to put our soldiers in those barracks and we will always do so."
Lieut Gen Parker, who is moving to a new post in England, is to be replaced in Northern Ireland by Maj Gen Chris Brown, a lower rank symbolising the downgrading of the command at Thiepval Barracks.
Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde has stated that the PSNI does not need military support and is fit to police Northern Ireland on its own, as it has done for many months.
The week's events involving the formal closure of the military operation have caused remarkably little political stir, with many political representatives opting to focus on the future. The DUP has publicly thanked the British army for its role over the past 38 years since deployment, and claimed soldiers had helped to hold the line while a political accommodation was worked out.
Sinn Féin, on the other hand, accused the army of acting in a colonial fashion, of bearing down on the nationalist population and of sparking a "dirty war" of intelligence and covert manoeuvres.