There is ordinary language, such as you and I use. And then there is the language of diplomacy, designed to be inexact. Take what the Taoiseach said recently about all our futures. "The process of a North/ South dimension," he said, "in whatever its final configuration, would be meaningful only if our agencies delegated powers, Northern agencies engaged in a similar process, and these powers were subsumed into an executive structure."
What might this mean in terms of an ordinary Irish person living an ordinary life? How can it be imagined? I thought of it when I was looking out of the bus at a little crowd of refugees - or maybe they're asylum-seekers - who have suddenly become part of my corner of Dublin. They seem to be living in a building down the road.
They're used to a better climate than this, so they're always out on the pavement. Swarthy men with Balkan moustaches. Thin, olive-coloured women in long dresses and flowered headscarves and Irish coats wrapped tight against the cold over their flounced skirts.
The fact is that at least a proportion of these gypsies or Romanians or Moldovans, or whatever it is these striking people are, have every right to be here, under international agreements, and they're going to stay here. And presumably neither they nor we will be content that they and all their descendants should engage in nothing but beggary.
So, strange as it may seem now, soon it will be ordinary to buy your paper from or get your photocopier fixed by an exotic-looking person who is also an Irish citizen. One element in our provincialism will begin to disappear.
We still have to cope with North/ South provincialism. People from Northern Ireland look just like us and they speak much the same English. At the moment, half the building workers in Dublin have Northern accents. Suppliers of building materials turn out to be from the North. Rugby administrators, specialist caterers, a few high-profile journalists - they're Northern.
But if the island is to move towards a state of general contentment, there's going to have to be a lot more than that. The phrase "North-South institutions" surely points to a multitude of small changes, the effect of which would be that the North would be part of our imagined home territory, and the South would be part of theirs. Not, perhaps, in this generation but, as with the refugees, in the next.
What, after all, is the desired end-result of all the talks, all the summits, all the changes to Acts and treaties and constitutions? Don't we want the island to be, simply, like Butlin's in Mosney used to be? Admittedly, a lot of the Northerners enjoying themselves there were only too often Catholics on the run from this or that in-your-face march. But Northern working-class Protestants went there, too. Everyone was equal, on the level of Glamorous Granny competitions.
Isn't that what a real opening of North to South would mean in other spheres? We'd get used to each other. When people have equal access to advantage, there's no basis for one lot to feel superior to another. If Catholics had co-owned Belfast in the 19th century - if they'd been the bankers and mill-owners and merchants and judges and Lord Mayors dining together in private clubs before going home to their wives and servants in big red-brick villas - do you think their descendants would be running around in balaclavas now?
The new North-South institutions would be in the areas, apparently, of agriculture, fisheries, the arts, transport, energy, medical research and other health issues, and education standards (whatever that means). So the Taoiseach said last week to the Financial Times in one of a series of statements in which he is drip-feeding us the insiders' vision of the future.
Note - we're not the insiders in this. The settlement of the ancient quarrel can't depend on us, and won't come from the bottom up. The structures that might make for peace are in the hands of the politicians. That's what politicians are for, actually - to take a longer and wider view than the individual can, and to construct institutions that embody the wider view.
Proposals like this North-South one, and accompanying initiatives like consideration of an East-West council, or of reacting positively to a new Northern Ireland administration, are politics at their best, and the next time someone starts whining about these bloody politicians the whiners might ask themselves: who else have we got at this level? If our leaders didn't bother to try to move us out of the big impasses, who else would?
The everyday challenge will be for us and for our Northern brothers and sisters, all the same. We'll have to live with them. Ordinary people are going to have to accept people they have defined as "other" - almost as "other" as the refugees - as normal, as part of the landscape. It doesn't matter what any given North-South institution may seem to be about. - soil testing, or training ballet dancers. The point will be not the activity itself but that Northerner and Southerner will have equal footing in it. And that it will have been devised by Northern and Southern people working together. And that it will in some way be jointly run by North and South.
Over the years, the International Fund for Ireland and other funds have been largely administered by Northern and Southern civil servants working together. Real, personal links were made.
In future, a great many more public sector employees are going to be thinking in all-island terms. Since there are - I think this is correct - approximately 280,000 people employed in the public sector in the Republic, that's a lot of transformed people, to start off with.
The refugees will not make their way towards privilege in our society without disturbing the privileges of someone else. Already, Irish beggars are losing pitches to foreigners. Native Big Issues sellers are having to share with Bosnians, and so on.
Similarly, numerous Southern empires are going to have to give part of themselves away to start making a North-South world. And they won't like it. I heard of an excellent plan proposed from the North for outreach university teaching in a location near the Border. The Department of Education here, I was told, turned it down flat.
The old remits will have to be rewritten. Yet civil servants are the last nationalists. What they have they hold. They don't give up territory till they're put in an armlock by politicians. Start they must, however, if the rest of us are to follow.
Since no reunification of territory is envisaged, our co-operative future is relatively simple to articulate - nothing like what Germany had to cope with in dovetailing East and West. It will creep in. It won't be noticeable, like the coming of multi-ethnicity with the refugees. But some day quite soon, when an ordinary person rings some State agency with an ordinary query, an office in Belfast will answer. And everything will have changed. That, I think, is what the Taoiseach said means.