New eras do not arrive fully formed. The first period obliges the well-behaved witness occasionally to widen eyes, lodge tongue firmly in upper cheek, whistle softly.
"Sinn Féin to publish Corporate Manslaughter Bill," said the heading on a statement the other day. Republicans did not get where they are today by cultivating a sense of irony. After years of refusing to condemn murder by their friends and associates, what, you ask, might Sinn Féin now define as corporate manslaughter? Well, apparently we're talking the sins of big corporations, the carelessness of major firms with the lives of their employees.
For maximum impact, Sinn Féin planned to "highlight the lack of Government action with imaginative street theatre" at Leinster House on Wednesday. Most attention in Dublin was elsewhere.
The Paisley-Ahern encounter at the Government's best official greeting place plainly surpassed expectations. The DUP leader rolled up to Farmleigh House in the sort of high good humour he has always been capable of alternating with harangues. Humorous interludes, though, have rarely dispensed entirely with "a jag", that northern gambit of sly sideswipe apparently as afterthought. Wednesday was jag-free.
No surprise, said some of the observers. Isn't it clear that the leader of his own church and founder of his party took a shine some time back to plain man Bertie as congenial and also plain-speaking? Warmth and courtesy rarely go unremarked. Maybe it was the bowl hand-turned from Boyne oak and presented as golden wedding present to happy couple Ian and Eileen in St Andrews that finally relegated the legend of Bertie as most devious of them all. Or perhaps a sea-change in attitudes is made up of many small things, borne along irresistibly when there is agreement to seize the tide.
To judge from the Paisley demeanour since March 26th and that public display of agreement with Gerry Adams, the DUP leader predictably enough enjoys every second of his new acclaim. He may simply be relieved to have stopped being Dr No. The interviews Baroness Paisley gave explained her husband's about-turn simply enough: didn't like it of course but no alternative, and the people had spoken to say get it over with, make the deal.
Only minnows of opposition have emerged since. The most peculiar as always are the critics from afar who look at Belfast from London newspaper offices and see only "a triumph for the extremes". The voters showed what they thought of the critics who had the gumption to stand for election. Distant rejectionists took no account of that. Many people in Northern Ireland must be ashamed of the Stormont deal, they wrote, in the teeth of evidence to the contrary. That a majority of voters supported the DUP and Sinn Féin in last month's election and that rejectionists within unionism and republicanism were swept away was cause only for nausea.
A present-day Westminster sketch writer who covered the early Troubles decided then that one side was as bad as the other, neither deserving of London's time and effort. This has polished up nicely into the maxim that people in Northern Ireland will do anything for peace, except vote for it. His own attitude frozen at the moment of departure, he likes to depict Belfast as iced-up.
Ian Paisley is 81 today. Last year he said, somewhat incomprehensibly, that his party would only power-share with Sinn Féin "over our dead bodies". But that was at a gathering of the Independent Orange Order, and even when much younger the DUP leader always took the line that what he says anywhere, at any time, is entirely irrelevant to what he may say somewhere else at another time. Though, of course, he is a man of his word. He is also a man of many words.
Mr Adams has his own words to live down. Yet to judge by the mood on the streets, on radio phone-ins and newspaper letters pages, the bulk of people in Northern Ireland are neither nauseated nor horrified that embattled ideologues have become willing collaborators. On the contrary. Many seem remarkably relaxed at the prospect of this unlikely administration, hopeful that against the odds old enemies may learn to work together.
Few in the North may relish a governing combination of Paisleyites and erstwhile violent republicans. Most recognise that both those groups have moved on, as they were constantly urged to do. The two extreme parties wrecked all previous attempts at agreement between moderates, but both have begun to transform themselves. All four significant northern parties will share power, with checks and balances - arguably a more representative governing structure than elsewhere.
Sinn Féin and the DUP were moved by the hands of history. Things may not have changed utterly but they are certainly in transit. Only those of ineradicable ill will or insuperable self-regard, surely, can find in that nothing but cause for complaint.