The challenge facing the party representatives who met at Stormont yesterday was, in Mr Bruton's words, to overcome the legacy of history, heal divisions, and remove the causes of conflict. Time will tell if they are up to it. History provides no precedent for consensus in Northern politics, and leadership, with some notable exception's, has not up to now been preoccupied with breaking moulds.
And so, with all the arduous commitment of a conclave of Orange lodge officers, the opening day of the first major attempt to secure the political future of the North by comprehensive negotiations - i.e. to use democratic means to find a settlement that has the support of all citizens - was turned into a pettifogging dispute about rules, orders of procedure and the "chairmanship. It is not that these matters are unimportant, or that it is unnecessary to start a process aimed at consensus off on the right consensual foot.
But the debate, as it filtered out of the closed session, was not characterised by rationality or a desire to meet opponents somewhere in the middle. The purpose of the unionists filibuster, which bore an ominous similarity to the tactics of the unionist leaderships in the months before the Anglo Irish Agreement was signed in 1985, was to impose their own exclusive stamp on matters about which their views had been canvassed and taken into account by the two governments. Mr Bob McCartney's claim that this represented democracy as opposed to despotic government is in itself an illustration of the fundamental problem of language that has to be solved.
On Mr George Mitchell's role, only days ago, both Mr David Trimble and Mr John Taylor had expressed reservations, but not insuperable ones; Mr Ken Maginnis, the UUP's spokesman on security, said yesterday morning that he thought the issue would be cleared without much difficulty. That was not to reckon with the Rev Ian Paisley and Mr McCartney. The talks will make very sticky progress if unionists adhere to the tradition of clustering around the highest common factor of reaction.
That is not to say that they alone were responsible for the inauspicious start of the opening day. The sight of Mr Gerry Adams hogging the media limelight was entirely the fault of whoever decided that the keynote addresses of the Taoiseach and the British Prime Minister would not be televised, leading to coverage which was, willy nilly, almost totally outside the meeting room at Stormont. Sinn Fein's exclusion was inevitably going to dominate international interest, followed by the blocking tactics of the unionists. With what may, sadly, come to be seen as symbolic appropriateness, the moderation and reason voiced by Mr Bruton and Mr Major were silenced presumably in order to prevent voices of dissent inside the chamber from being heard.
That showed bad judgment. Inside and outside Northern Ireland, the word has gone forth that division rules and democracy, regardless of what Mr McCartney says, comes nowhere. What does this do for Mr Major's unexceptionable plea to participants to "think their way into the minds of their traditional antagonists, to try to understand their fears, their concerns and their aspirations"? Or for Mr Bruton's reminder that "Northern Ireland can only work successfully if it inspires for the first time an equal sense of ownership on the part of unionists and nationalists"? These, respectively, are the means and the end of what started yesterday, but no one would have thought it.