According to a senior republican, "we are trying to lead people in a certain direction, but we can only lead them as far as they will go".
This was not said this week, but almost a decade ago. The republican was attempting to persuade this reporter that Sinn Fein's then new-found rhetoric about seeking an end to the conflict meant something and that the republican movement was in the middle of a major self-examination rather than an empty public relations campaign.
At the time, the republican appeared unconvincing. However, with the benefit of hindsight, he was clearly speaking the truth. The movement to which he belonged was at a crossroads, and has now been led a substantial distance. He said the movement would have to move towards political engagement and away from violent conflict.
However, he was concerned that angry young IRA members had no time for the new and subtle rhetoric used by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to signal an openness to change.
He recalled how a young Northern-based generation of republicans in the 1970s had taken over the movement from an older generation, and wondered were there were now young men preparing to do the same again. That, he said, would make any movement pointless. This time, they had to bring those who would reject compromise with them.
It was a startlingly frank analysis of where the republican movement might be going, at a time when to most observers it seemed entrenched in a permanent violent campaign.
It seems striking now how constant this view has been among senior republicans. As one British source said a week ago: "We are moving at the pace of the slowest vehicle in the convoy." This echoes the analysis given by the republican that those who might reject compromise must not be left behind.
Considering the extraordinary changes since the republican made his comments, it is clear that that slowest vehicle has moved a very long distance.
However, it has not moved far enough and, since the suspension of the political institutions, appears to be moving backwards.
Now that the most recent IRA offer on decommissioning has been withdrawn, the interlocutor is gone. Martin McGuinness has suggested the prospects for decommissioning have been set back "many years", while Gerry Adams has encouraged a return to street protest. Tomorrow Sinn Fein holds a special conference in Dublin which will examine where the organisation goes. The self-evident observation that the republican movement moves very slowly should not distract from the fact that it nevertheless moves. The next step will require even greater movement than before from republicans as well as great flexibility from the Ulster Unionist Party.
It is becoming clear that any formula to resolve the decommissioning/devolution problem will involve the abandonment of the May 22nd deadline implicit in the Belfast Agreement for total disarmament to take place.
The Taoiseach said as much in the Dail last Tuesday. "If the timescale is not the exact timescale that was there before, we need to work out and agree between the parties another time scale," he said.
If that is not a clear enough indication, then recent comments by the IRA make it absolutely clear. It will not decommission "on British or unionist terms". As the Taoiseach remarked recently, the IRA has an unfortunate tendency to mean what it says on this matter. This week it was not possible to find a politician or official on the Irish or nationalist side who believed decommissioning would take place by May 22nd.
Instead, the universal assessment is that there will be no IRA move on decommissioning in a situation where such a move is being demanded as a condition for the restoration of the political institutions set up under the Belfast Agreement. "No guns, no government" has become "no government, no guns".
Government sources say they hope to change the question: having consistently resisted decommissioning, the IRA should be asked to put forward some alternative means of demonstrating convincingly that its war is over.
There is no obvious answer to the obvious question as to how unionists could possibly agree to such a move. If there is a formula to give unionists the "clarity" they require on the IRA's intentions, while accepting there will be no IRA movement before the institutions are running again, nobody knows what it is.
The Taoiseach also said as much in the Dail this week. "It would be wrong for me to say that there was one solution to deal with the problem because that is not the case," he said. "All the parties are not ad idem or going in the same direction but they are coming forward with ideas and are determined to find a resolution to the problem."
The IRA added to the sense of pessimism earlier this week by briefing selected journalists to the effect that a series of Sunday newspaper reports purporting to give details of the IRA offer to Gen John de Chastelain of a fortnight ago was entirely wrong.
Those reports suggested a day of reconciliation would take place at which a gesture of decommissioning would happen, and that within three months the IRA would make a declaration that "the war is over". Proposals such as this were certainly discussed during the intense 13 days of talks with Sinn Fein, however they are not believed to have been written specifically into the final IRA offer.
However, The Irish Times understands that the third and key element of those reports is at the core of the withdrawn IRA offer. As reported in this newspaper over the past fortnight, it is that the implementation of the commitment to demilitarisation contained in the Belfast Agreement would provide a context in which demilitarisation could take place.
The IRA denial that weapons would be traded for demilitarisation under this formula is literally true: IRA theology insists that while the British government is required by the Belfast Agreement to demilitarise, the IRA is not obliged by the agreement to decommission. Therefore IRA decommissioning in exchange for British demilitarisation is out; IRA demilitarisation in the context of British demilitarisation is the accurate version.
The offer is technically withdrawn, although obviously it represents a position the IRA was willing to adopt in certain circumstances. There is speculation that within the republican movement there is great debate on what was offered and whether it should have been put forward at all. Tomorrow's conference provides a further forum for discussion on the way forward.
Amid the pessimism, there is continuing debate and discussion. The capacity for movement can best be measured by comparison with where we were 10 years ago rather than 10 days ago.