IT'S conventional wisdom that, as in Last Year in Marienbad, nothing will happen next week in Washington.
This doesn't mean there will be nothing for our wandering politicians and keen-eyed commentators to write home about.
While they may not have a single significant event around which to build headlines, there is still more to reflect on - more to build on and more to lose - than at any time since the signing of the Belfast Agreement.
To concentrate minds, there's a new deadline for the establishment of an executive: April 2nd, Good Friday 1999; halfway, lest we forget, between the historic agreement and the date set for its completion.
And there's a warning that, this time, there will be no safety net. Or, as Mo Mowlam says, no Plan B.
It's already clear that no new American intervention is expected. In any event, what has been achieved during the past year was largely the work of the Northern parties and the Irish and British governments. Let them get on with it.
There's no denying they've made substantial progress. This week alone David Andrews and Mo Mowlam signed four agreements providing for six North-South implementation bodies, a North-South ministerial council, a British-Irish council and a British-Irish intergovernmental conference.
So what?
Well, the areas covered by the implementation bodies may not set Lough Erne on fire, but they include food safety, trade and business development, language, aquaculture and marine, special EU programmes and inland water ways.
Once they've begun to work, they'll have around 880 on their staffs (mostly transferred from existing agencies) and the cost will amount to about £56 million a year.
Liz O'Donnell noted the missing trumpets. "There is a certain absence of poetry or of rhetoric," she apologised to the Dail.
"But the history of relations between nationalist and unionist, between North and South, between Britain and Ireland has been marked by a great deal of poetry, a great deal of rhetoric.
"There have been few opportunities, in that history, to use the more sober prose of effective public administration. Viewed in that perspective, the fact that we now need to make provision for complex arrangements, worked out in careful detail, is a cause for celebration."
A year ago, she would not have had to apologise or to explain. Implementation bodies were the stuff of passionate controversy: "In the lead-up to Good Friday, the negotiations on North-South issues in Strand Two were intensely difficult. More time was spent on them than on anything else. Even during Holy Week it looked as if the negotiations might break down on precisely this point."
Now, though, public attention has switched to decommissioning and even the British-Irish council - the Council of the Isles - seemed to attract more attention in Scotland this week than it did here.
Commentators who had previously dismissed decommissioning as an issue of no importance now write or speak of little else and ignore the many elements of the Belfast Agreement which are already well in hand.
Some have taken to expanding on the Sinn Fein line that, from the beginning, decommissioning was part of a unionist plot - an issue raised to prevent Sinn Fein's would-be ministers from taking their places in the executive.
Others suggest that a resolution might be found in a formula of words which, with some pressure from the Irish and British governments, the Ulster Unionist Party and Sinn Fein might be persuaded to accept.
But this is not a case for an empty formula, as the Oath of Allegiance was famously described by Fianna Fail when the party decided to take its seats in the Dail in 1927.
Nor can the Belfast Agreement be rewritten as, some years earlier, de Valera had proposed to rewrite the Treaty in Document No. 2.
As Ken Maginnis explained on Dunlop and Finlay on Thursday night, decommissioning was always at the heart of the Belfast Agreement; the agreement wouldn't have been negotiated, written or signed if it were not so.
Mr Maginnis detected an unusual level of agreement on Northern policy among the leading parties in the Republic and pointed with particular satisfaction to Bertie Ahern's unequivocal attitude to decommissioning.
IT would have been ungracious of Nora Owen, who was on the panel, to point out that the Taoiseach followed where John Bruton, Ruairi Quinn and Dick Spring had led.
She pointed instead to an impressive record of bipartisanship which has persisted through the thick and thin of domestic affairs since the early 1990s.
One of the most encouraging features of Mr Ahern's attitude, both to the agreement and to decommissioning, has been the consistency of a view based not so much on theory as on sound practical judgment.
The Taoiseach established his approach several months ago when he spoke of the endorsement of the agreement in referendums, both North and South, and said that what people had voted for was not an armed peace.
Those who questioned, first, the presentation and, then, the text of his Sunday Times interview, had either forgotten this telling phrase or chose to pretend that it was open to some hidden interpretation.
"Decommissioning in one form or another has to happen," Mr Ahern told the Sun- day Times. "Without at least a commencement of decommissioning" it would be impossible for Sinn Fein to be part of a government in Northern Ireland.
That may be close to David Trimble's view that what the unionists are looking for is a credible start to decommissioning.
Too close for comfort, as Sinn Fein sees it.
But it's not playing games, as some foolishly suggest in their commentaries on Mr Trimble. And it's not a question of coming to the end of the unionists' room for manoeuvre.
As, I believe, Mr Ahern sees life and politics, it's a question of what can or cannot be done. And having a party at the cabinet table which has a private army at the back door is just not on.
MR Ahern is a politician who pays a lot of attention to his own territory, who takes note of what's happening in his own back yard.
He doesn't have to travel to Belfast to learn of the intimidation which is part of the paramilitaries' stock in trade, or the cynical arguments of their allies, who hope to convert the fear they generate into political influence.
If he is to help the Northern parties overcome the barriers raised by paramilitary organisations and paramilitary weapons, it will be by encouraging discussion and disarmament, not by responding to intimidation and fear.