The peace process has continued to make breakthroughs and gestures that not long before were considered impossibilities, writes Kevin Cullen
It is an extraordinary scenario: on his deathbed, a Roman Catholic priest reaches out for the man who once loudly denounced his leader, his Holy Father, as the antichrist.
That Mgr Denis Faul would make a deathbed plea to the Rev Ian Paisley to stick to his guns, as it were, on the issue of the "disappeared" is not that surprising.
Father Faul, as many of us called him long after his elevation to Monsignor, was nothing if not shrewd. He would have surveyed the political landscape and realised that the only person with the political capital, and incentive, to spend on an issue he held so fiercely was Dr Paisley.
Denis Faul and Ian Paisley dug with a different foot. But as men of the cloth they were cut from the same cloth: deeply conservative on social issues, deeply pious in their religious beliefs, warm and gregarious in person in spite of their dour public images.
And so, because of Mgr Faul's deathbed intervention, Dr Paisley has spoken to, and will soon meet, Vera McVeigh, whose son, Columba, was murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1975. Mrs McVeigh is a sweet, lovely woman who wants nothing more than give her son a Christian burial.
That she still sits, 30 years on, tortured by the unknown, is one of the Trouble's cruelest legacies.
Mrs McVeigh, a Catholic, said she drew great strength from Dr Paisley's attention. Her faith in Ian Paisley is not an isolated case.
Earlier this year, another man I met many years ago in Belfast, a well-known loyalist named Raymond McCord, met Gerry Adams, saying he believed Mr Adams could help him get answers to the 1997 unsolved murder of his son, who was beaten to death by a UVF gang.
McCord believes his son's killers include informers who are being protected by the police.
Mr Adams said Mr McCord was not the only person from a unionist background who has sought him out to get to the bottom of the unsolved murders of their loved ones.
Just a few years ago, someone from Ray McCord's background going up to Gerry Adams's office on the Falls Road would be dismissed as having something of a death wish.
But things change. Attitudes change. For all the talk of a peace process in crisis, for all the angst over the impending November 24th deadline, there has been a visceral change in the political culture of the North, and of the whole island.
Mr McCord didn't stop at Mr Adams. He called on the Taoiseach, asking for support in his demand for a full inquiry.
"I'm giving Bertie Ahern the opportunity to show they are concerned about unionist victims, too," said Mr McCord.
Some might argue that Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams are using the anguish of Vera McVeigh and Ray McCord for their own narrow political agendas. Dr Paisley, after all, can say the DUP won't share power with Sinn Féin because it remains inextricably linked to an organisation that continues to torture Vera McVeigh by refusing, or being unable, to return her murdered son's body.
Mr Adams, after all, can point to cases like Mr McCord's and say Sinn Féin will not join the board overseeing a police force still peopled by the kind of officers who would protect UVF murderers.
But, whatever Dr Paisley's or Mr Adams's motives are in meeting with and helping those from a community not of their own, the significance is that it is the victims' loved ones who wanted the meeting and the help.
In keeping with his beliefs, Mgr Faul would appear to be having an impact beyond his earthly life: the recent controversy over the fate of Jean McConville, and the Cabinet's expected approval of a new approach to find the five bodies of the remaining "disappeared", whom the IRA admit to killing but whose bodies have not yet been recovered, suggests this is an issue that will "not go away, you know".
A new paradigm is emerging on the island of Ireland, where old labels don't apply. When Sinn Féin and the DUP topped the polls a few years back, most pundits suggested the moderates lost and the extremists gained.
But is it really accurate to still call Sinn Féin and the DUP extremists when they are democratically chosen by sizable majorities in their own communities?
In any post-conflict society, it is the former extremists who cement the peace. They, after all, are the ones who were fighting.
The DUP and Sinn Féin have supplanted more moderate rivals within their own communities despite their inextricable links to loyalism and the IRA, not because of them. Sinn Féin does not canvass for votes by winking at nationalists and saying: "If the unionists don't play ball, we'll go back to war."
It sells itself as being better than the SDLP at getting potholes filled and keeping the neighbourhood health clinic open, and it has steadily attracted a growing number of middle-class voters who once voted for the SDLP.
Both Sinn Féin and the DUP have also gained support by portraying themselves as best suited to holding the other accountable. They claim to be more principled than the so-called moderates, who, they say, want peace at any cost.
Some conclude that, as a result, the two parties will jointly create a perpetual stalemate. But such an analysis ignores the fact that both parties' leaderships want to wield power more than old slogans.
While Paisley thunders on, demanding the disbanding of the IRA, other DUP officials have worked with Sinn Féin on local councils, and presumably would work with Sinn Féin at the Assembly level if a compromise can be reached.
None of this will be easy. But to say it is impossible ignores the history of the peace process, which has consistently produced breakthroughs and gestures that not long before were considered impossibilities. Old shibboleths die, but far fewer people do, because of an imperfect but still viable process.
When the Belfast Agreement was reached, eight long years ago, I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe which sought to assess what it all meant. Not surprisingly, given his penchant for short, trenchant verse, Michael Longley, the Belfast poet, had one of the best, most succinct descriptions of its significance.
"Sometimes I feel Irish. Sometimes I feel British," Longley said.
"Often I feel neither. The Agreement allows me to feel more Irish, more British and, just as importantly, more neither."
In reaching out to Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, Vera McVeigh and Raymond McCord feel more neither. That has to be a good thing.
• Kevin Cullen, former Dublin bureau chief of the Boston Globe, has covered the conflict in Northern Ireland for more than 20 years