It's a sunny day and Gerry Adams is in a good mood. He's enjoying the election, likes meeting people on the doorsteps and especially having a joke and a laugh with the kids in the neighbourhoods. But one suspects the Sinn Fein president wouldn't be so laid back if the political process was going badly from his point of view.
I've seen him on bad days. When the ceasefire broke down in 1996, an RTE colleague and I thought he was going to burst into tears in front of us. By doing so he would have broken the Fenian John O'Leary's rule that one should never cry in public for one's country. Republicans don't crack so easily, but it was a striking indication of the emotional investment Adams had made in the process which he and John Hume had started some years earlier.
He greets me with a literary flourish: "Happy Bloomsday!" James Joyce didn't have much time for republicans, if one may judge from the bigoted, boorish character of the Citizen in Ulysses. But Gerry Adams would see himself as a long way removed from that boozy and boastful portrait of a nationalist.
Far from sitting on bar stools holding forth about Ireland's wrongs, Mr Adams and his followers are preparing for a much different role in post-agreement, cross-Border, consensus-driven, inclusive, modern Ireland.
"Sinn Fein is ready for government. That's in terms of the Assembly, the cross-Border bodies which will be linked to it, the all-Ireland council of ministers, the potential for moving transitionally into a new arrangement," he says. All very fine, but how can this unique cross-party government actually work when the putative first minister, one David Trimble Esquire, won't even speak to Sinn Fein or hold bilaterals with the party?
"Well, he'll have to work with us, if this is a new era. The man is an intelligent professional who signed up to an agreement, and in the same way that I have to seek to implement that agreement, including bits that I don't like, then he has to do exactly the same.
"And if he doesn't, then we're not in a new era, and it's up to the two governments to seek to create the conditions where all of the opportunities which have been created can be realised and built upon. But it's a question essentially for David Trimble more than a question for me."
I put it to him that his party had been sending out signals that it wanted a Sinn Fein minister for equality.
"We certainly want to see a new department for equality and we put that forward during the negotiations. We haven't said we want that ministry - we have said it's a matter for negotiation, and let's see who's elected."
There are many on the unionist side and among the British Tories who say they won't have him and his like in government until there is decommissioning.
"I took a decision about three weeks ago that we had said enough on all of that, that this is all somebody else's agenda." Pressed on the issue, he explains: "I have talked more and said more and been asked more about decommissioning than about any other issue - and if you read the agreement there are no preconditions in it." But would he not even give the unionists the comfort of saying the war is over? "War by its very nature means at least two sides. I'm not involved in war." As for the timing of any possible decommissioning: "That's a matter for the armed groups and for those who have the weapons."
When it comes to D words, Sinn Fein leaders much prefer to talk about demilitarisation than decommissioning. Mr Adams gives a concrete example of what he means. "When I was dozing about six o'clock this morning it came into my head: how would you know there was peace? When you didn't hear the chopper." Like the character in the film Apocalypse Now, he woke up to the sound of whirring blades, except that in Mr Adams's case it was a real helicopter and not a fan attached to the ceiling. Four years after the first IRA ceasefire, he wonders what it is about.
He draws attention to the helicopter whirring over our heads as the interview is taking place. He doesn't claim to have his own personal surveillance helicopter, but he always knows when his car is coming to pick him up because he hears the helicopter first. His trusty press spokesman and ever-present shadow, Richard McCauley, joins us. Without prompting, he asks his boss if he has heard the chopper. One can't avoid the impression not even be a peashooter will be handed over until those whirring blades are out of Gerry Adams's life. He points out that British soldiers were on patrol the previous evening as he canvassed in West Belfast.
He is measured in his assessment of Sinn Fein's election prospects. "We're going to win at least 15. We won 15 in the last Forum. I see us winning about 17 seats and you really couldn't call it after that. We might win 18, we might win 19, but I'd be very happy if we win 17."
Then there's the marching season. Mr Adams was encouraged by the comments of an Orange spokesman who spoke yesterday morning of the need for dialogue with nationalist residents. He believes a firm approach on such issues yields results.
"So you have a decision to reroute an Orange march in north Belfast. On foot of that, you've got a leading Orangeman taking a sensible view and saying that he doesn't see any reason why they can't meet with residents." The Tour of the North march in Belfast on Friday may turn out to be a peaceful occasion, but we are all trembling in the shadow of Drumcree. Could he not use the influence he is supposed to have and urge the nationalists to make a gesture of conciliation, as the head of the Parades Commission, Mr Alistair Graham, had suggested?
"Well, I don't know what gesture they can make, to be quite honest. The marches are an issue of equality. This business of there being conflicting rights is sheer nonsense."
He had repeatedly supported the right to hold Orange marches, and the fact that almost 3,000 of them took place showed that this right was generally recognised. "So what's involved? Contentious parades - about a dozen. What are they about? They're about domination. The only reason why any Orangeman wants to go down Garvaghy Road is to tell the people of Garvaghy Road that he's in charge. And those days are over."
What he calls "the primacy of dialogue" is fundamental for Gerry Adams. He cannot recommend Sinn Fein supporters to give any of their transfers to parties that are against dialogue - the UUP, for example, which refuses to meet Sinn Fein.
However, he allows that there may be candidates in some constituencies who are known to oppose the UUP's no-dialogue policy and, in that case, a transfer would be in order. But there will have to be direct dealing. The old days are over. He sees the situation in the same light as he saw it on the evening of the Good Friday agreement. "I felt that, although there had been a very, very significant achievement in getting the agreement, by virtue of some of the parts of it we were into a battle a day."