Whatever about the timing of the occasion, the Taoiseach's address to the joint Houses of Parliament at Westminster was well judged, writes Garret FitzGerald.
It rightly celebrated the final normalisation of the Irish-British relationship after centuries of contention and conflict. And did so in language that did justice to the occasion.
No one can miss the irony that it is the IRA which, after centuries of conflict, finally brought our two states together in this way.
The IRA violence forced a fundamental Irish rethink of the counter-productive and provocative anti-partition policy to which all our political parties had foolishly committed themselves between 1949 and 1969.
It also forced a recognition that the security interests of the Irish State required a stabilisation of the Northern Irish polity within the UK.
If Irish governments, with their advantage of an instinctive understanding of Northern nationalist motivations, were to have a hope of succeeding in modifying Britain's Northern Ireland policy they first had to secure credibility in British eyes as objective actors in the Northern scene.
This had to be done rather than appearing as self-interested parties, a role in which until the 1970s they had consistently presented themselves.
It is not sufficiently recognised that in the evolution of Irish policy historic interactions between our political parties came to play an important constructive role.
Fianna Fáil's role in fomenting irredentism in relation to Northern Ireland, a stance that up until 1969 infected those of other parties, is open to serious criticism.
However it should be recognised that from 1932 onwards Fianna Fáil saw rhetorical republicanism as a key weapon in the process of marginalising the IRA, thus securing the stability of our State. This remained a preoccupation of the Fianna Fáil leadership up to the early 1990s.
However, no such consideration constrained Fine Gael and Labour.
In the case of Fine Gael, its leaders' support for rhetorical nationalism began to be challenged within the party in the late 1950s.
When I joined it in 1965, I did so on the understanding that I would not be required to support this stance, which I had been challenging publicly since 1948.
Then, after violence had broken out in the North in August 1969, I succeeded, with the help of some like-minded party members such as Paddy Harte, in getting the front bench to adopt a new Northern Ireland policy. This formally insisted that political reunification of the island take place only with the consent of a majority of its people.
This document also proposed joint government of the North by political representatives of the two communities - two years before the newly-formed SDLP made this its policy goal.
While some time was required for this new approach to become universally accepted within Fine Gael - some older members found it difficult to abandon their commitment to rhetorical anti-partitionism - by 1972 all members were committed to the new policy.
Meanwhile, Conor Cruise O'Brien had fought and won a similar battle within the previously very republican Labour Party.
These two parties now had a distinctive stance on Northern Ireland, one that increasingly looked to the emergence of a pluralist Ireland within which all traditions could find a comfortable home.
Jack Lynch and some of his colleagues were also moving towards a somewhat similar approach. However they were inhibited from openly expressing this view by a prudent desire not to open their flank to a move by Charles Haughey and his supporters to use such a move as a weapon to take over the party. This they succeeded in doing after Lynch's resignation in late 1979.
During Haughey's first 12 months in office, our Northern Ireland policy temporarily drove into a cul-de-sac.
First of all Haughey, as new taoiseach, vainly sought to secure a radical shift in Britain's Northern policy, possibly in return for a new defence arrangement.
At the same time, somewhat contradictorily, he attempted to guard his back vis-a-vis some of his more extreme supporters by attempting to abandon previous governments' policy of taking on IRA adherents in the US.
Both these initiatives failed ignominiously, and together with Haughey's decision to abandon participation in EU sanctions on Argentina following the Belgrano sinking, they ended any possibility of him being able to negotiate with Margaret Thatcher on Northern Ireland.
However, for the following quarter of a century Irish policy was single-mindedly, and eventually successfully, directed towards securing changes in Britain's Northern Ireland policy that would yield peace and stability in that part of the island.
The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement secured British recognition of our State's vital interest in peace in the North.
At the same time, through our insertion into the agreement of a clause proposing that acceptance of powersharing would minimise our State's involvement in the North, it also offered unionists an incentive to a settlement. This they short-sightedly failed to take up.
However, the agreement also offered hope to nationalists because part of the new arrangement was to involve British enactment of effective anti-discrimination legislation which succeeded in wiping out that evil within little more than a decade.
Finally, most important of all, by helping to draw Northern nationalist support back from Sinn Féin to the SDLP, and by demonstrating what could be achieved by peaceful negotiation, the agreement aimed to encourage Sinn Féin to contemplate a switch from violence to the peace process, and eventually had this effect.
Between 1988 and 1992, with John Hume's assistance and encouragement, this bait was eventually taken by the IRA leadership and finally yielded the Hume/Adams document.
Albert Reynolds, deploying effectively his friendship with John Major, and shaking off without compunction the now redundant shackles of Fianna Fáil rhetorical anti-partitionism, then successfully transmuted this into the Downing Street Declaration.
Next came John Bruton's negotiation of the Framework Document with the Major government, and then our present Taoiseach's efforts in Belfast at Easter 1998.
This was followed over a long nine years by Ahern's patient and sensitive nursing of the process through to its extraordinary conclusion two weeks ago.
So much for the Irish side of this process, all of it backed by the brilliant diplomatic efforts of our civil servants.
But all this could not have yielded success without the remarkable parallel contributions of three British prime ministers; Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.
They were aided by a host of British ministers and distinguished civil servants, all of whom came to show a combination of remarkable openness to new ideas and a clear commitment to creating a totally new relationship between our two states and people.
At a time when our political leaders are engaged in intensive, and not always edifying, close combat, it is worth remembering what politicians can achieve when put to the test.