With Gerry Adams meeting Bertie Ahern and Ian Paisley talking to Tony Blair, the peace process finally looks ready to fall into place - but hardly today, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
Gerry Adams is meeting the Taoiseach today in Dublin; Ian Paisley is conferring with the British Prime Minister in London. Mr Ahern and Mr Blair hope they will have fairly definitive answers to the governments' blueprint for restoring devolution and that those answers can be distilled into one historic word: yes.Indeed the signs are that that the H-word may be due another airing - rather amazingly, considering the main players, there is a real possibility that Northern Ireland is about to embrace the mother of all deals.
Consider: no more IRA activity; no more IRA arsenals; loyalist paramilitaries thinking about reciprocation; Sinn Féin signing up to policing a little way down the line; a minister or ministers of justice for Northern Ireland - one of them a Sinn Féiner; the Northern Executive and Assembly back on the road driven by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness.
Who'd have thought it - Sinn Féin and the DUP doing business? It could all fall into place over the next couple of days, or by next week, but hardly today.
Now, no one wants to play the bah humbug part in what could be a powerful pre-Christmas peace process presentation, but experience insists that it is also wise to enter a caveat when it is required.
You must never forget that this show isn't over until the Big Man sings, and yesterday the only note DUP leader Dr Paisley was sounding was one of caution, but mixed with hope. "If this decommissioning problem can be solved, then we are on our way," he said after meeting the head of the disarmament body, General John de Chastelain.
"But it is not solved at the present time," he added.
We'll come back to that. Let's accentuate the positive for the moment. It's a truism of this tortuous process that Northern Ireland will have turned the corner when it has a police service that enjoys the support of nationalist and unionist, loyalist and republican.
Yesterday, hugely symbolic and practical steps were taken to that end when, with Mr Tony Blair chairing, the Sinn Féin president Mr Gerry Adams met the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Mr Hugh Orde, in Downing Street.
They were primarily together to discuss demilitarisation. This is significant in itself because it's about detail - what army bases will go; when will troop levels be reduced to garrison levels - and when you start discussing detail, it generally means that the mammoth issues of principle have been dealt with, or largely dealt with.
Both men knew what message was being sent: Sinn Féin and the IRA are prepared to sign up to policing. That should mean that in a year or so if, for example, someone attacks a PSNI officer in west Belfast or south Armagh, they are effectively attacking Sinn Féin, which - having ministers in a Northern Executive - are with their ministerial colleagues responsible for policing. By the same token they are attacking the IRA, which even if it does end up as an "old soldiers' club" will still have clout in republican areas.
This blueprint the British and Irish governments have put together is their best read of what, primarily, Sinn Féin and the DUP can live with. There will be elements of the paper Dr Paisley will like, some he won't; the same with Mr Adams
Most of the gain will be for Dr Paisley, though. He can reap the political harvest sowed by but denied to Ulster Unionist leader Mr David Trimble. The DUP seems satisfied that the IRA is serious when it says it will go away and render its arms beyond use. Why is that? It's hardly just because Mr Ahern and Mr Blair told Dr Paisley that's what the IRA will do.
Dr Paisley said he would never be bluffed, so he must have received firmer assurances. No source will confirm this but it seems reasonable to assume that he knows what statement the IRA will issue to back up the conviction that it is prepared to superannuate itself .
On top of that, there will be a form of ministerial code of conduct in place that makes it more difficult for individual ministers to act with absolute autonomy. We are told, however, this will be within the terms of the Belfast Agreement. Therefore, both DUP and Sinn Féin, if so minded, can argue that they have not compromised their opposing positions on ministerial accountability.
The blueprint contains much more detail, such as a 12-24 month target date for devolving responsibility for policing and criminal justice to the Northern Executive. But because it will be a cross-community vote issue, the DUP has an effective veto over when that will happen. Another plus for the Doc.
But equally Dr Paisley's political journey is of almost Damascene dimensions. After 40 years of comfortably living in Never Never Never Land, he is prepared, after a matter of weeks of heavy negotiation, to reside with Sinn Féin in a big rowdy house on top of a hill at Stormont, with the right agreement, of course.
A done deal then? Dr Paisley, for a while at least, ready to act as First Minister to Mr McGuinness's Deputy First Minister? Well, nearly. Dr Paisley's weekend remarks about the need to "humiliate" republicans and their requirements to "wear sack cloth and ashes" did not assist the effort to secure a deal. There is also that little DUP requirement of photographic evidence to back up the work of General de Chastelain and the Protestant and Catholic clerics who will oversee future IRA decommissioning.
That photographic verification would only be produced for the DUP when it was absolutely clear that it was actually sharing power with Sinn Féin.
It's obvious why this is symbolically difficult for P. O'Neill - he would hardly fancy DUP election billboards appearing around Belfast ahead of the expected May Westminster election with a picture of decommissioned IRA weapons alongside the headline, "IRA surrender to DUP", or some such phrase.
"We are on our way" if the obstacle of a visual element to decommissioning is surmounted, said Dr Paisley yesterday. But at the time of writing there was no such offer from the IRA. "They haven't said it will happen, and they haven't said it won't happen," said one senior source. The governments hope that if the DUP delivers on power sharing the IRA will deliver on pictures.
Nearly there, but still a few inches short of agreement. It's the last, huge call for republicans and Dr Paisley. Would Sinn Féin see the chance of a comprehensive deal collapse for the sake of a snap of an AK 47? Would Dr Paisley see all the DUP has gained lost for the sake of a picture of an old rifle?