Getting used to Sinn Féin as a serious political player pains much of the Republic's political world.
"Let Northern Ireland adjust to the uncouth creatures while we ignore them" has been the widespread if unspoken wish. But now nerves are frayed by awareness that the Taoiseach is locked in negotiations with Adams and Co.
Government "sources" brief optimistically one day and the next play down hopes of rapid progress. The sticking point is the structures, it is said, or the method of voting in the first and deputy first ministers. It's currently about policing. No, it's still first and foremost the question of how the IRA can reassure unionists, and others, that it will go out of business in a defined period.
Speculation swishing back and forth creates perfect conditions for an onset of squeamishness. When Dermot Ahern envisaged Sinn Féin in government North and South and said "I hope that happens", he stitched in the preconditions of IRA inactivity and disarmament. It still rankled, because the supposition was that loyal Dermot voiced his master's secret thoughts. Ifs and buts from Ahern Number One were taken merely as expression of his famed deviousness and the loyal spokesman theory was confirmed rather than discouraged.
The Dermot offering was interpreted as a warning to the PDs that they should no longer consider themselves the only available coalition partners. Or it was meant to help the DUP, who could now move more easily towards power-sharing with Sinn Féin since the most likely main player in any future Dublin government had "envisaged" republicans as coalition partners. Or, alternatively, Dermot's intervention was meant to put pressure on the DUP, in that it removed the most plausible unionist argument for refusing a deal: that Dublin wouldn't countenance sharing with Shinners either.
Sinn Féin meanwhile, during their 12 (on average) daily press statements, confined themselves to repetition of a two-part mantra: 1) are the DUP serious?; 2)any deal must be within the confines of the agreement.
The DUP, by DUP standards, had nothing to say. The combination of mantra on the one hand and silence on the other completed an impression of background hard bargaining.
It is perfectly possible that Aherns One and Two said what they said with not a care as to how it would play in the North. When the assertion was first made that of course republicans could not be eligible for inclusion in the Government of the State because Sinn Féin was tied to the IRA, there was small care for Northern sensitivity. David Trimble could take his jump into the unknown. Dublin governments would be making no comparable leaps.
Unionists drew the inevitable conclusion then, with much resentment, that the Republic regarded its institutions as a sight more sacred than the one their Government had helped negotiate for Belfast, no matter that they proclaimed the Belfast structures to be mould-breaking. The entire nationalist spectrum said less but felt much the same.
People across the board went into the process of making peace with teeth gritted against what they knew would be unpleasant necessities.
Republicans pasted on smiles as they walked into Stormont's parliament buildings, seat of unionist rule, then adopted a group pose as kings of the castle. Ulster Unionists took former loyalist paramilitaries with them into negotiations to ward off accusations of sell-out. Many relatives of the thousands killed and injured swallowed hard throughout negotiations, agreement and the early release of killers and other paramilitaries.
Are we only a few years from a time when the Soldiers of Destiny sit in government side by side with the Legion of the Rearguard? An appalling vista to many, the closer it seems. The killers of Jerry McCabe may be home for Christmas after their increasingly luxurious imprisonment, while many choke back fury.
But Southern rage at the very idea of accepting Sinn Féin bona fides makes many Northerners feel sick. It is another example of difference between two populations, a gulf in perceptions. Few Northern nationalists instinctively understand the average Southerner's uncritical identification with the State that brands republicans "subversive", a word unfamiliar north of the Border.
Even among those who loathed the IRA when bombing and shooting were wholesale and who find the self-righteous posturing of latter-day republicanism nauseating, there is little empathy with the reluctance in the Republic's political classes to contemplate the power-sharing they commended for Belfast.
But then preferences and tendencies in the upper crust of the metropolis are often adrift of views common to the general populace of the Republic.
The last election's evidence of disgruntlement at the grassroots is likely to have been as much a consideration with the Taoiseach, reborn man of the people, as tactics to wrongfoot or to lull the DUP.