The safe docking in Barrow-in-Furness yesterday of the Pacific Pintail with its toxic cargo of nuclear fuel will mark the welcome end for British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) of a 75-day PR nightmare played for all it was worth by Greenpeace.
Last night the train carrying the fuel completed the last stage of its journey reached Sellafield in Cumbria
Greenpeace's campaign, with its images of derring-do as small boats pitted themselves futilely against the great tankers and their armed guards, played on the justifiable fears that many in Ireland share about Sellafield's processing operations and its threat to the Irish Sea.
Those concerns have been the source of a real tension in the otherwise flourishing relationship with Britain, tensions that London consistently underestimates, mistakenly, perhaps, seeing the Government's campaign in the courts as a token concession to unrepresentative environmentalists.
Not so. They speak for us all. Such fears had been compounded further by the fact that the shipment from Japan of five tonnes of reactor-grade plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) was rejected by the Tokyo Electric because BNFL had falsified safety records. Environmental campaigners were able to make much of the latter's "unreliability".
The protesters, carefully staying within the bounds of the law, have skilfully kept the issue at the forefront of the public agenda. But the case against its shipment by sea was perhaps less convincing, resting as it did in large measure on the supposedly imminent danger of terrorist hijack. Quite apart from the fact that the fuel in its current state would not be of much use to terrorists who would require a large and sophisticated reprocessing plant to turn it into weapons-grade plutonium, the actions of the protesters ensured that the shipment was better guarded than the Crown Jewels.
The possibility of a terrorist attack is always there, but assessing the real risk should be done with considerable caution and sobriety. Taking practical measures to sharply minimise the likelihood of attack can make it acceptable.
That, at least, is the argument being made by those who caution the world community to hasten slowly to confront Saddam Hussein.
Crying wolf has its dangers.