The North's institutions have to be strong enough to face the truth about dark deeds during the Troubles, including evidence of security force collusion with loyalist killers, writes Susan McKay.
Tony Blair closed the door on 10 Downing Street this week, the last of the British soldiers in South Armagh closed the door on the huge army base in Bessbrook, and the North's Director of Public Prosecutions closed the door on the Stevens inquiry.
Life goes on. Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley guffaw at each other's every word up at Stormont. Gordon Brown has already cancelled his first prime ministerial visit to "the Province". Ageing pillars of society line up to tell us we've got peace now, so it is best to leave the North's troublesome past alone for the foreseeable future.
The remarkably muted reaction to the Public Prosecution Service's (PPS) decision suggests that many agree. But something is badly wrong with this view. We got a glimpse this week into what Sir John Stevens found out about the use by Britain of loyalist paramilitaries as proxy killers for the state.
That brief view was shocking, and the decision to do nothing about it is outrageous, especially in the light of revelations of a similar kind from Nuala O'Loan, the outgoing Police Ombudsman.
Stevens, now Lord Stevens, was Britain's most experienced senior policeman. Over a period of 18 years he spent £20 million (€29.6 million) on three investigations. In 2003, he revealed that he had found hard evidence of collusion between the security forces and loyalist murderers. He said he could only publish a fraction of his findings but that he had submitted more than 20 files to the PPS.
Four years of silence from that office followed. The silence was broken on Monday.
Peter Magee was a smiling Belfast teenager with shiny hair and bright eyes who was murdered by loyalists in 1992. His mother, Clara, still grieves for him, but like many others bereaved by the Troubles, she had learned to live with that pain. However, early on Monday morning, the past suddenly left her devastated all over again.
Woken by the doorbell, the 75-year-old found two men in suits proffering a letter. They left her to read that it was the RUC who supplied the gun that killed her boy and that it had been decided that nobody was to be prosecuted. The letter was from the PPS.
Peter Magee was one of five Catholics who died in a UDA gun attack on a bookmaker's shop in Belfast in 1992. His sister's husband was critically injured. One of the gunmen shouted, "Remember Teebane", a reference to the IRA's sectarian slaughter of eight Protestants in Co Tyrone two weeks previously.
The then chief constable, Sir Hugh Annesley, called the bookie's massacre "sectarian" and "murder madness". He added, however, that it was not out of control. The RUC later said it had conducted a full investigation and taken 400 statements. No one was ever convicted.
Monday's statement was given to Mrs Magee and others connected with victims of the UDA in the late 1980s to early 1990s, including the family of the murdered solicitor Pat Finucane. We already know that the only man convicted of that murder said Special Branch put the UDA up to it, and that Stevens said the murder could have been prevented.
The statement revealed, among other things, that William Stobie, a Special Branch agent and UDA quartermaster, had handed guns over to his police handlers in 1989. "Steps were taken" to deactivate one of the guns, a pistol, and to "partially deactivate" another, and they were handed back to Stobie. The "steps" were ineffective, because the UDA went on to use the pistol to shoot up a pub in 1991. One Catholic man was killed and a nine-year-old boy lost an eye. The gun was not retrieved from Stobie.
The same gun was used in the attack on the bookie's three months later. The PPS said that while the identity of a constable who handed the weapons back to the UDA was known, he was only following orders from superior officers who could not be identified.
That statement, at the very least, does away with the "bad apple" theory which suggested that a few low-level policemen and soldiers might just have been colluders but that it didn't extend upwards.
The PPS has been criticised before for failing to prosecute loyalists in cases where there appeared to be strong evidence, including several cases related to the Stevens inquiry during which potentially explosive evidence of collusion looked likely to emerge. The SDLP called this week's decision "the mother of all cover-ups".
After Judge Peter Cory called for an independent inquiry into six murders including that of Finucane, the British promptly rewrote the law, prompting Cory to say that no self-respecting judge would preside over the limited sort of inquiry now possible.
Don't forget that Cory was appointed after talks that were part of the peace process. It would be immoral to argue that now that we have got to a settlement, we can abandon the agreements which were made to get us there.
Al Hutchinson has called the "dripfeed" of inquiries into past police practice "debilitating" - an odd position for the incoming police ombudsman - but he also called for the "proper architecture" to be devised to search for truth and justice.
Now that there is no risk of disrupting legal proceedings, we should, for a start, be shown the Stevens Report. People like Clara Magee were at the raw edge of the Troubles. Now she is being asked to accept that the state colluded in murdering her son, but that in the interests of peace, her family must move on and let justice go. It is too much to ask.
Anyway, how can it possibly be right to ignore evidence of such corruption, and to refuse to learn the real history of the Troubles? The British will look bad, Sinn Féin has dirty hidden history and so has the DUP. But if our new democratic institutions aren't strong enough to withstand the truth, they aren't strong enough.