Ian Paisley told the Belfast Telegraphthe other day that his maxim is live and let live. Fresh images of Paisley-McGuinness smiles pop up every couple of days, demonstration enough to many that the world has tilted on its axis.
It would be untrue to suggest that this has distressed many beyond the unregenerates who would have preferred the IRA to keep going, and the DUP leader to keep on shouting no. But some reckon that the new age needs buttressing by new thinking. The trouble is that a fair bit of new thinking sounds like special pleading.
You could take the trend right back, of course, to the IRA's first ceasefire and beyond, to what republicans called Sinn Féin's peace strategy. From the start it was clear that republicans would demand punishment for police and soldiers while insisting that their own violence, except for regrettable mistakes, had been entirely justified.
Party president Gerry Adams conducted an inquiry into his own past and found - to the surprise of many of his contemporaries - that his contribution had been entirely political and that he had never been in the IRA. There could be no danger, therefore, of his past tripping him up in a new dispensation.
So it has gone on. Former IRA prisoner Martina Anderson, now a Sinn Féin representative on the policing board, would like the criminal records of paramilitary prisoners destroyed. It is indeed incongruous to have a former IRA leader as joint head of government while other former paramilitaries are barred from minor posts. But it would also be nice if republicans stopped complaining about the sins of others.
Senior police have been grizzling for several years that policing today is hampered by inquiries into collusion. Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde made his reputation searching for collusion but now repeatedly suggests making the past off-limits. The "Historical Enquiries Team" was set up with its own budget precisely to remove the burden of re-investigation from the present-day police. From day one, they set out to minimise expectations.
Meanwhile inquiries stumble on, hibernate as with the prolonged writing-up of the mammoth Bloody Sunday report, or face into sterility as with those established under new British legislation introduced precisely to limit their scope. A fortnight ago Maurice Hayes, one of the most judicious assessors of the Northern situation, added his voice to dismay at the cost and duration of the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday, and said he doubted it would unearth the definitive account.
In more unsettling vein, he spoke of the dangers to the delicate plant of present-day progress of "too much scrabbling in the underground looking for evidence of the bad husbandry or the criminal neglect of yesteryear". There was "a lot to be said for drawing the line, in order to let politics and mutual trust develop". If Bloody Sunday, why not inquiries for every other atrocity beginning at Abercorn and ending at Omagh? In the Presbyterian General Assembly days later, the Rev Dr John Dunlop quoted Senator Hayes and called for inquiries to be shut down immediately.
The launch of an official study group to look for consensus on how to "address the past" is said to be imminent, to be chaired by retired Church of Ireland primate Lord Eames and former joint chair of the policing board Denis Bradley.
In his memoir, Minority Verdict, Maurice Hayes eloquently recounted how he resigned as head of the Community Relations Commission after Bloody Sunday because "I could not be even vicariously the representative and defender of a government that shot its citizens on the streets". A man impressively honest about his own and the wider community, he also reflected that his motives were mixed and he was unsure he would make the same decision again. But he has never until now backed away from recognition that Bloody Sunday demanded inquiry because it differed from other atrocities before and since, because the state itself was responsible for the killers.
Among the many Hayes contributions was his central role in drafting the Patten report, which prescribed structures and ethos for a new policing service to replace the old RUC. The constant complaints from present-day police about the constraints of the past have no doubt borne in upon him, hence perhaps part of his worry for the new Stormont.
For the vengeful, it would never be time to call halt. The triumphant rewriting history and the wise recommending amnesia are not much more attractive a proposition. The likeliness of a muddled outcome to the Saville inquiry and its indecent cost and duration have fed the despair many feel about attribution of blame through public tribunals, an experience now also familiar in the Republic. Many in the North take some satisfaction in knowing that the hatches as yet have not been finally screwed down. And the supposedly fragile new deal was surely built on mutual clear-sightedness.