It was Seamus Mallon, speaking at the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin, who said that one of the benefits of the peace for very many people in Northern Ireland was the relief of not having to listen to every news bulletin from early morning till late at night.
Last weekend, even in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of Derry, it was all too clear that those grim days are back. All over the North, parents begged teenage sons and daughters not to venture into mixed areas and stayed up late to make sure that children were safely home. The palpable tension makes it more important than ever to keep a sense of proportion. As more than one politician has remarked grimly in recent days: "Nobody ever said it would be easy." There is every likelihood there will be more shocking violence as the participants struggle on to find a settlement. For that is what they have to do.
If there is a glimmer of hope to be gleaned from the events of the past fortnight, it is that they have concentrated the minds of serious politicians and highlighted the need for the two governments to take a firmer and co-ordinated grip of strategy. Like most people in this island, I have enormous admiration for Dr Mo Mowlam and am deeply grateful for the energy and commitment which she has brought to the job.
But the peace process is an Anglo-Irish project. If it is to succeed, the two governments must work, and be seen to work, much more closely together. If there are differences over strategy, these must be resolved privately and, if necessary, at the highest level. For some time now there has been a disturbing impression that nobody is in overall control of what is happening. David Andrews says one thing, Bertie Ahern disowns it. Inevitably, the resulting confusion unnerves all the participants.
It was evident before the Stormont talks broke for Christmas that the leaders of the fringe loyalist parties were facing problems over their prisoners. The transfer of a small number of IRA prisoners from jails in Britain to Ireland had already led to complaints that the republicans were being favoured.
This perception that the peace process has consisted of an unending stream of "concessions" to Sinn Fein is fraught with difficulty. It is undoubtedly widespread in the unionist community, but it doesn't stand up to serious examination. In a column in the Irish News this week, Brian Feeney makes the point, very trenchantly, that there will have to be radical changes to the structures of Northern Ireland society if the promise by both governments to guarantee the legitimate rights of nationalists is to be fulfilled. To describe these changes - for example to the structures of the RUC, the regulations governing Orange parades - as "concessions to the IRA" is deliberately to muddy the waters in order to frustrate progress.
But, even against this background, the widely divergent views of the two governments on the issue of paramilitary prisoners were bound to cause problems. It was clearly a case where a common strategy should have been agreed in advance. It has become fashionable in recent months to say the elements of a settlement in Northern Ireland can be written on the back of a postage stamp. The ingredients are familiar: a power-sharing assembly in Belfast, strong cross-Border institutions to protect nationalists, possibly closer links between this island and the neighbouring assemblies in Scotland and Wales.
The hope is that if these reasonable arrangements can be endorsed by a popular vote in referendums in both parts of the island, this will provide the time and space for the whole political atmosphere to soften. The longer term will then look after itself.
This is already a very optimistic scenario. The experience of recent years, particularly over such issues as the Orange parades, has shown that the old hostilities on the ground, far from disappearing with the coming of peace, seem to loom even more dangerously. But let us suppose that the overwhelming majority of people in Northern Ireland will be prepared to go along with a negotiated settlement which offers the best hope of peace.
For nationalists, imbued now with a much greater sense of their own power, there is a new confidence that there can be no return to the bad old days of discrimination, so vividly conjured up in the recently published Northern Ireland cabinet papers for 1967.
Most unionists accept that that era of one-party domination is over, and want an equitable settlement based on the democratic principles of consent.
But can the long-term future be left to what one of our senior mandarins refers to frequently as "the cunning of history?" It is precisely their deep anxiety about what happens in 10, 20 or 50 years which underlies the current wave of complaints from unionists about "concessions" to nationalism.
It may be, as Father Denis Faul argues, that there are many nationalists who are not particularly enthusiastic about a united Ireland and who, given full equality, will settle easily within the existing Northern Ireland state. But unionists know the demographic tide is against them and believe this accounts for the buoyant political confidence of the nationalist community.
The voting figures are eloquent. In the 1974 Westminster election unionists received 62.1 per cent of the popular vote and nationalists 29.7 per cent. By May 1997, the unionist share had dropped to 50.5 per cent, while the nationalist vote had climbed to 40.2 per cent.
These figures appear in an editorial in the newsletter published by John Robb's New Ireland group. The writer continues: "It would be unrealistic to assume that a settlement which leaves the Border intact will provide a lasting solution. The very large and growing size of the nationalist minority is likely to heighten tension over the existence of the Border." The writer urges Northern Protestants to look again, without fear, at the potential of an all-Ireland solution.
This is what lies at the heart of the unionist community's insecurity: the fact that there can be no ultimate guarantee about the future. There are those, like John Robb, who have always argued that the best course for Northern Protestants is to confront this fear and to negotiate a settlement which enables both communities to share the island together.
That may seem mere fantasy at the moment, but leaving any discussion of the long-term future out of the talks is not likely to help either community. For this State the challenge is to offer unionists a greater sense of ownership of the island as a whole, and their part in its history, while reiterating the commitment to the principle of consent. It is a subject to which we will return.