The key question is, as it has always been, a challenge to the people of Northern Ireland. Can they, with the help of the Belfast Agreement and the encouragement of Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and Bill Clinton, find it in their hearts to live together?
What people in the Republic are being asked to do is to say whether they're willing to share the efforts of political leaders in the North who are bent on making the agreement work.
The challenge is deceptively simple. It is also desperately urgent, as David Ervine suggested the other day, when he said that change was happening more rapidly than people imagined; what mattered now was whether they were prepared to manage it.
If they are, they will achieve a degree of stability the North has not enjoyed for more than 30 years and a balance between the rights and aspirations of the communities which it has never known.
If they fail, we will all be left with a vision of dreary steeples and the integrity of an ancient quarrel. Even those who have been calling on the electorates to vote No can hardly relish the thought - and they can offer nothing more.
"Roll on the 22nd of May and let the people speak," Ian Paisley roared during a visit to Limavady on Thursday. For once we could hear the cheers of David Trimble and Seamus Mallon, confident that what the people say will be No to Dr Paisley and his allies, and No to their mirror images in the green.
That's how it looks in the latest Irish Times/MRBI poll, but it's clear that with every hint of paramilitary influence or show of force, clouds of doubt are gathering over the middle ground, especially on the exposed slopes occupied by the Ulster Unionist Party.
UUP supporters, who had been pessimistic all along, felt a sudden surge of enthusiasm - hoping against hope? - when the agreement was final ly completed; they were poorly prepared for what some must have seen as the headlong pace of change which was to follow.
In a divided society in which either side watches the other's reactions and worries at any sign of satisfaction, unionists must have found nationalist support for the agreement overwhelming.
Then there was the more worrying prospect of Sinn Fein's participation in a power-sharing administration.
That would come once the agreement had been endorsed, North and South, and a Northern assembly fell to choosing its executive on the basis of electoral strength.
But what seems to have caused most concern among middle-class unionists was the spectacle of four convicted IRA murderers being given a feverish welcome at the Sinn Fein Ardfheis last weekend.
(What the unionists made of Michael Stone's appearance at a rally organised by the Ulster Democratic Party on Thursday we can only guess: they are almost as wary of loyalist paramilitaries as they are of republicans.)
The British government's handling of Sinn Fein and the IRA was the source of Jeffrey Donaldson's dissatisfaction with the agreement in the first place. It is clear he is still determined to say No, in spite of a visit from Tony Blair which was meant to take the sting out of those features of the agreement which Mr Donaldson and his UUP allies found most problematic.
In the poll, the release of prisoners was the reason given by 45 per cent of those questioned in the North who said they intended to vote against the agreement.
It was by a long chalk the most quoted reason for voting No, and it may have been significant that questioning began two days after the ard fheis, when unionists in Belfast and John Bruton in Dublin were still complaining about Bertie Ahern's fumbled response to the appearance of the Balcombe Street gang.
Mr Ahern eventually agreed in the Dail that it had been an insensitive display and said his own dismissive response had been misunderstood.
Even Mitchel McLaughlin, the most plausible of Sinn Fein's spokesmen, refused to acknowledge that it had been a potentially costly mistake, one bound to cause serious difficulties for Mr Trimble.
Sinn Fein's leaders, who stand to gain substantially from the process of which the Belfast Agreement is part, still seem intent on issuing demands, as of old, without recognising that they too must contribute to new relationships.
Sunday's display was reminiscent of the moment in 1994 when the Provisional IRA announced its first ceasefire and young supporters drove down the Falls Road waving Tricolours and shouting "We won the war".
It wasn't true and, even if it was, the boast would not have helped relations between the communities, though better relations was one of the results the ceasefire might have been expected to achieve.
It still doesn't seem to have impinged on the leaders of Sinn Fein that there is a glaring contradiction between denying any knowledge of or connection with the IRA at one moment and embracing some of its best-known activists in triumph at the next.
It's not only Mr Bruton and Proinsias De Rossa who have called on the IRA to say clearly that the war is over; such an appeal was made most movingly this week by a man called Alan McBride, whose wife was killed by the bomb at Frizelle's fish shop on the Shankill Road.
Mr McBride, who is urging the Northern electorate to support the agreement, also appealed to the IRA to make two other gestures of symbolic importance. One was to say, as the loyalist paramilitaries have said, that they were sorry for the pain they had caused; the other was to hand in some weapons, as a sign that the campaign of violence was at an end.
George Mitchell spoke this week of his most difficult moments in the multi-party negotiations: they were those in which an absence of trust appeared to block not only progress but communication.
I am sure the indefatigable Mo Mowlam, whose contribution to politics has been recognised by her fellow citizens, would say the same.
Mr Blair spoke of confidence-building measures nee ded from certain organisations "after all the suffering they'd inflicted on people in Northern Ireland".
Many of the measures which he promised to include in legislation are designed to ensure that, when the time comes, it will no longer be necessary to argue about the bona fides of parties that have severed their connections with paramilitaries and are ready to take part in new Northern institutions and a new political project.
Next week's referendums are, as Senator Mitchell continues to remind us, part of a process to which political leaders have already contributed heroically, against all the odds. It would help greatly if the obstinacy, bitterness and suspicion which marked the multiparty negotiations during their week in Dublin were avoided.