Four years ago this weekend the people of this island were in shock, coming to terms with the carnage that was Omagh; twenty nine men, women and children blasted to eternity, scores maimed and mutilated, hundreds of family members, friends, neighbours, bereaved and traumatised.
Omagh was the unthinkable. The peace process appeared to be firmly bedded in. The paramilitaries on all sides had largely stayed their hands for months. There was no softer target than Omagh on a pleasant Saturday afternoon in August.
Surely, it was reasoned as the coffins were lowered into the ground, this had to be the end of it. Only hearts of stone could ever again contemplate the use of bomb or bullet. The sacrifice of Omagh's innocents would be the last. And so it appeared for a time. Republican dissidents declared their own ceasefire. This State armed itself with additional security legislation. Perhaps the biggest ever North-South police investigation got under way to apprehend those responsible for the atrocity.
The victims of Omagh did not die in vain. Four years on, nothing remotely comparable has happened. The main paramilitaries have held to their ceasefires, more or less. The language of violence is more muted and is less widely accepted. Much of the "never again" rhetoric which followed Omagh has been matched by commitment and action on the ground.
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Yet as time goes by, the germ of violence begins to mutate in different forms. Dissident republicans have again turned to murder - most recently in Derry, claiming the life of a civilian worker at a Territorial Army post with a booby-trapped lunch-box. Loyalist paramilitary murder gangs pick young Catholics at random. In north Belfast and elsewhere, orchestrated street-violence keeps tensions at breaking point. The drift towards large scale violence is a constant threat.
The only alternative to such drift is to maintain the political process. Yet supposedly responsible elected representatives speak almost casually of the possible downfall of the Executive and the suspension of the Assembly. The IRA moves at snail's pace to disarm. Sinn Fein refuses to co-operate with the PSNI investigation into Omagh. Unionists demand the expulsion of Sinn Fein from power and plot the downfall of David Trimble, the leader who has brought them to the secure ground (if they could but recognise it) of the Belfast Agreement.
If the Agreement fails and if the institutions are suspended the alternative will be some form of direct rule, possibly with London and Dublin sharing authority in some measure. And with the failure of politics will come the reassertion of paramilitary power. If the pledges made over the coffins of the Omagh victims have any worth, those who are in a position to do so will ensure that the Agreement endures and that the peace it promised is made complete.