THIS was the eleventh year of Anglo-Irish Agreement. And no, you didn't miss the party. The event itself was lost in preparations for the final, definitive failure of the most difficult year in London/Dublin relations since the Hillsborough Accord was signed.
For the players and pundits - and, most cruelly, for the people - it was a long year of acrimony and confrontation. It will take some time to determine where the cumulative failures, disagreements and departures leave the Anglo-Irish relationship. But, in reality, the pattern for this year was set in the first seven weeks. For all the diplomatic shuttling, the drafting and redrafting of crucial documents, the private (and sometimes very public) arguments, and the dramatic late night attempts at brokering - nothing of substance was to change thereafter.
Before we reached St Valentine's Day, the always-improbable suitors in the Northern Ireland "peace process" had gone their separate ways.
On January 24th, John Major embraced Ulster Unionist proposals for an "elective process as an alternative to his and their demands for the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons ahead of political negotiations. Some time before this, we now know, the Provisional IRA had determined on a return to war. And on February 9th, at a minute past 7 p.m., they detonated a massive bomb near London's Canary Wharf, killing two men and the hopes of millions.
As the shock waves crashed around the corridors of Whitehall and Iveagh House, neither politicians nor security experts could account for an unprecedented intelligence failure. The atmosphere in London, Belfast and Dublin was of stunned disbelief. Television images heightened the sense of unreality - mixing the images of carnage with those of hope which had attended President Clinton's historic visit to the North just weeks before.
The Government had lost out badly in the crucial Anglo-Irish negotiation preceding the president's visit. But ministers and officials embarked upon 1996 purposefully optimistic. After all, the president's man - former senator George Mitchell - was firmly established as chairman of the International Body on Decommissioning. Dublin's hope was that Mitchell would get the British off the so-called "Washington 3" hook - the demand that paramilitaries begin decommissioning ahead of all-party talks. However, one shrewd Irish player feared this fanciful. "It's the Brits, stupid," he replied, when asked how Mitchell might square the circle.
According to this thesis, "Washington 3" was not about guns and explosives - rather the pretext for immobility, the device to establish British control of the process. This source believed London would drop "Washington 3", when it no longer had utility - in exchange for a new precondition. For nationalists, that new pre-condition had already taken shape - in the form of the Northern Ireland Assembly or Forum advocated by the Ulster Unionist leader, Mr David Trimble - before the Mitchell Report was published.
As early as January 12th, The Irish Times reported that proposals for an elected body in the North - fiercely opposed by the SDLP and Sinn Fein - had been discussed at length by some of the parties making submissions to the International Body.
The British had consistently maintained there was no point convening all-party talks if all parties would not attend. Mr Trimble had advanced the elective process as an alternative means of establishing Sinn Fein's "democratic" credentials.
It was never clear how Sinn Fein, in his judgment, would become a different creature as a result of a further electoral outing. But no matter. Mr Trimble's plan appeared to offer a way of bringing all parties under the one roof. On the other hand, London was convinced that Mr John Hume's mantra - set the date for talks, and proceed with those who turned up - guaranteed a unionist boycott.
The signs were unmistakable. Mr Major favoured a trade-off - Mr Trimble's elected body for "Washington 3". Indeed, the evident gulf between London and Dublin reinforced the belief that this was precisely what was on the cards. British sources made it clear that, contrary to Dublin's view, "Washington 3" was not within the remit of the International Body. The timing of decommissioning remained a matter for the British government to decide.
Crucially, and again contrary to Dublin's view, London also let it be known that recommendations in respect of an elected body would not exceed the Mitchell brief. How else, indeed, was Mitchell to perform his miracle?
But if the evidence was before their eyes, Irish ministers and SDLP leaders appeared wholly unprepared for what was to come. On the morning the Mitchell Report was to be published, this journalist asked Mr Hume what date he fancied for the elections? "What elections?" came the dismissive reply. His deputy, Mr Seamus Mallon, appeared equally shocked at the idea that Mr Major was about to announce the elective process that very afternoon in the House of Commons.
By midday, it was clear the Labour front-bench at Westminster knew what was afoot. The first editions of the Belfast Telegraph were running a speculative but clearly informed piece. Yet when RTE ran a similar item on the lunch-time news, it triggered an angry and challenging call from the Department of Foreign Affairs.
There would be a dispute later about what Mr Major did or did not tell Taoiseach John Bruton, during their telephone call before his Commons statement.
But there would be no dispute about what Mr Major did that afternoon. With great agility he got himself and the unionists out from under the 20 pages of the Mitchell Report, and re-established his own agenda. Mr Mitchell, he said, had not concluded the paramilitaries could not decommission, simply that they would not.
It would be a step forward if all parties embraced the six principles, and still more if Sinn Fein would accept the principle of consent. London welcomed the report on the modalities for a decommissioning process, but the problem remained - how to bring the parties together.
Self-evidently, Mr Major said, the best way to engender confidence was for the paramilitaries to make a start on decommissioning. But there was another way. The International Body had pointed to it - a "broadly acceptable elective process, with an appropriate mandate and within the three-strand structure, could contribute to the building of confidence".
The effect was explosive. On big set-piece occasions, it is usually the unionists who misjudge "the mood of the House". On this occasion, Mr Hume had no care for such delicacies. To Tory jeers he told Mr Major not to "waste" another 17 months, accusing him bluntly of attempting to "buy votes" to keep himself in power. The SDLP leader's anger signalled a crisis of confidence throughout nationalist Ireland.
More than two weeks later - while insisting there was "no moral equivalence" between acts of violence and "mistakes" made by politicians, the Taoiseach too was still fuming. Speaking on BBC television on the Sunday after the end of the ceasefire, Mr Bruton said: "I believe that the decision to introduce in the middle of this process the idea that there was only two ways forward... one, a pre-condition of giving up weapons, or a pre-condition of an election... this open-and-shut presentation in the House of Commons... was a mistake."
"Open-and-shut" seemed - and seems - to have been about right. Knowing the consequences of failure, the two governments continued their quest for agreement. There was the palaver about "proximity talks" before Mr Bruton finally bought the elections to negotiations and the Northern Ireland Forum. The "fixed date" for the talks was finally set - June 10th.
The two governments agreed Ground Rules - against which the unionist parties at Stormont still strain. Mr Trimble finally endorsed their agreement that Mr Mitchell should chair the talks process - arguably the one development which might prove of lasting political significance in terms of the now-established international dimension.
But that crisis of nationalist confidence signalled by Mr Hume on January 24th was to survive the crises which have dominated the Anglo-Irish agenda - Drumcree, disillusion with a talks process still dominated by the decommissioning issue, and, finally, last month, Major's rejection of Hume/Adams proposals designed to secure a second IRA ceasefire.
Mr Major began the year reeling from Ms Emma Nicholson's defection to the Liberal Democrats, with a technical Commons majority of five. He ended it desperately struggling to avoid a Wirral by-election which would place him in a minority, vulnerable to a confidence vote in which the Ulster Unionists could trigger a snap election. Nationalists naturally see a close connection.
But it is at least possible to read the events of the year from a different perspective - that which was offered by Mr Major himself on the eve of the Anglo-Irish summit on December 9th. He claimed he had been "betrayed" over the first cessation, and vowed: "I'm not going down a fake path again."
Republicans have vehemently rejected that "fake" charge. But if that is what Mr Major believed at the start of the year, it certainly provides a coherent context for everything he did thereafter.
The repeated nationalist/republican charge is that Mr Major's conduct of the process was about establishing his "control". His supporters would tell it differently - that it was about "calling the IRA's bluff". It may be the cause of incredulity in Dublin. But that, indeed, is how it looks.