There has been an extraordinary shift in the balance of power in Northern Ireland: from the centre, long considered the most likely source of movement towards a settlement, to the loyalist and republican extremes.
Perhaps it was coming for some time, beginning with the promise to paramilitaries that, once they had agreed to give up violence, they too might aspire to becoming part of a solution.
It may have changed direction as ceasefires led to disputes about what constituted an irrevocable end to violence. The pace of change suddenly quickened with the murder of Billy Wright: an itchy INLA finger on the fast-forward button speeding events towards a conclusion that has not yet come clearly into view.
The extent of the shift - and the size of the risk that Mo Mowlam has taken to secure a settlement - was clear to viewers of BBC Northern Ireland's Newsline on Thursday evening, when yesterday's meeting with the prisoners was previewed.
Here were the people with whom the Secretary of State was about to discuss the future of Northern Ireland: loyalists and republicans who, between them, had been sentenced to many hundreds of years for crimes which, in their view, made them political prisoners.
Men who'd been convicted of murder and conspiracy to murder; men known and feared for their crimes - torture, intimidation and extortion; members of organisations which, in the world outside the Maze, barely stayed their hands until it became clear what the prisoners thought.
The prisoners met Dr Mowlam yesterday, which startled many, North and South, especially when they discovered that Michael Stone was in the loyalist delegation representing the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Freedom Fighters.
In a world in which nothing happens until it's been seen on TV, Stone was the ultimate villain: filmed as he killed three mourners in Milltown cemetery during the funerals of three members of the IRA shot dead in Gibraltar in 1988. That he should now claim dialogue was the only way was hard to credit.
But the upside-down world of paramilitary heroes and villains - as they rubbed shoulders with our elected leaders - was on view in Newsline's coverage of another event during the week.
This was the arrest of Brendan McFarlane, who'd succeeded Bobby Sands as the leader of IRA prisoners in the Maze in 1981. He'd been sentenced for his part in an attack on a bar in which five people died, and was eventually released on parole less than a year ago.
NOW HE has been charged with the false imprisonment of Don Tidey and with arms offences in Derrada woods near Ballinamore, Co Leitrim, where Mr Tidey was held in 1983. Gary Sheehan, a trainee garda, and Patrick Kelly, a soldier, were killed in a shoot-out during Mr Tidey's rescue.
What BBC viewers saw was the President, Mrs McAleese, greeting McFarlane during her visit to Belfast last month. He, too, seems to have been a convert to dialogue. But, allowing for welcome changes of heart and mind, especially among the paramilitaries and their political allies, it hasn't been easy to make sense of events. And some of the coverage in the Republic has been little short of bewildering.
Is it just that we don't like to remind ourselves of certain facts? That people claiming to speak for us have planted a bomb which, but for the work of British soldiers, might have blown Banbridge and a scatter of its citizens to smithereens?
That others, who no doubt would claim to be more Irish than the rest of us, assembled a stock of explosives in Howth which would have blasted the heart out of another small town - in another state, of course, with a population not ours?
RTE is an easy target; too often attacked by colleagues who are far from incisive themselves. But the absence of serious comment and analysis of Northern affairs since the murder of Billy Wright set the politics of this island spinning towards disaster has been inexplicable.
The station has been sinking for some time into the muddy waters of smug nationalism, from which no one looks up to ask where we're heading and who the hell - Gerry Adams, John Hume or Bertie Ahern? - is leading us there.
Apart from Mr Ahern's feeble interview on This Week and a few sentences from David Andrews, we haven't heard a peep from the Government since the shutters came down for Christmas. Mr Adams, meanwhile, goes from strength to strength.
Since he got to pose outside Government Buildings with John Hume and Albert Reynolds, within days of the IRA's 1994 ceasefire, he has spread his wings. There was a time when he spoke for West Belfast; then it was Northern nationalism, a superior brand of Irishness.
Now he claims to speak for the great pan-nationalist family, North, South and worldwide. An exclusive group to fit the year that's in it: non-nationalists are non-persons, as non-Catholics once were in this tight little State and non-nationals - especially those who are neither fair-skinned nor English-speaking - are becoming.
Mr Adams's grandiose ambitions and superior style are all very well. The same can't be said of their meek acceptance by other nationalists (in politics and the media) and their imitation by loyalists.
Seamus Close of the Alliance Party was enraged by Dr Mowlam's decision to go to the Maze. Here was a Secretary of State jumping through hoops to please terrorists who were holding the rest of the population to ransom.
But the loyalist paramilitaries have been learning from the Provos for decades. The surprise is that it has taken them so long to reach the point where they look and sound like mirror images of the Provos or even the INLA.
When they choose to put on a display like the one which marked Wright's funeral in Portadown, we are not only reminded how well the loyalists have learned the lessons of the IRA but how eerily both resemble the fascists who flexed their muscles across Europe in the 1930s.
As Dr Mowlam and her colleagues breathe a collective sigh of relief following her day's work at the Maze, they might pause to reflect on the way the all-party discussions have been allowed to continue, the price paid and the trouble ahead.
Power has shifted, from the centre to the extremes; from the mainstream parties to the paramilitaries and, among the paramilitaries, from those outside the Maze to those inside.
The message sent by the prisoners to the politicians was unmistakable: listen to us or you'll have our armed and active allies to deal with. In the nature of things, paramilitaries - in prison or outside - don't negotiate; they come up with a list of demands.
And, in the nature of the Northern conflict, the final demands of those who are now making the running are bound to be mutually exclusive.