Looking back over the past 35 years, we can trace the complex course by which Northern Ireland has arrived where it is today. And to those who do not have a sense of the contingency of history, some or all of what has happened in between may now appear to have been pre-ordained.
But it could all have turned out quite differently. History, I sometimes think, is a process that converts prospects that seemed at one time inconceivable into what in retrospect appears to have been inevitable.
A number of factors that we in the Republic grossly underestimated at the time, provide important parts of the explanation for what actually happened during the past 35 years.
The first of these was the extraordinary impact that the visceral fears of the isolated unionist community in Northern Ireland have had upon the way in which their political leadership responded to the developing crisis. Repeatedly these deep-seated fears have led them to fail to grasp political opportunities, and to react - as they did at the outset when face with a Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s -- in ways counter-productive to their own long-term interests.
The distorting effects of these fears made far more difficult the achievement of what must surely have been the ultimate unionist aim: a Northern Ireland guaranteed by universal Irish nationalist and republican acceptance of the principle that its relationship with the Republic must be governed by the principle of consent.
Of course we had ourselves contributed to this neurosis by the grossly irresponsible way in which we in this part of Ireland had reacted, especially in the early post-war period, to the political division of the island. The ill-considered anti-partition campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, to which all Irish political parties contributed, both reinforced unionist fears and encouraged extremist elements in Northern nationalism.
In fairness to our politicians, it should be added that from around 1972 onwards they effectively abandoned that provocative irredentism and began to seek instead, eventually with success, to guide British policy along a constructive path. But we can now see that by the time these belated efforts began to show success, nationalist Northern Ireland had been so transformed by its bitter experiences as to make the transition to peace a much more thorny path than any could have foreseen.
A major factor in the tragedy of the past three decades was the difficulty successive British governments had in grasping the futility of treating this crisis as one that could be solved by security measures. Such measures gradually drove an ever-growing proportion of the Northern nationalist community into the arms of the IRA, and it took two full decades for Irish politicians to convince British governments to review radically that flawed policy.
This process was complicated by British politicians' understandable loyalty to and deference towards their Army, once that force had become engaged in Northern Ireland.
Unhappily these concerns frequently outweighed the underlying liberalism of the British political system, and for several decades fatally distorted much of British policy in relation to Northern Ireland.
The post-1970 Irish view of the path towards peace, through a radical change in British security policy that would reduce support for Sinn FΘin and force the IRA to reconsider its campaign of violence, ultimately proved correct.
But, even when the Hume/Adams talks had led to the Downing Street Declaration of eight years ago, none of the constitutional politicians in these islands fully understood the complex dynamics of the tortuous process they were launching.
By contrast the very able leadership of Sinn FΘin/IRA did foresee how they could play this situation to maximum advantage, and thereafter succeeded in dominating the negotiating process. Of course there were those who saw the initiation of the peace process as a naive political mistake on the part of the constitutional politicians involved - a view propounded by Conor Cruise O'Brien, Ruth Dudley Edwards, and what might be described as the Independent Group commentators - amongst whom I do not, of course, include Maurice Hayes's always wise reflections.
On the other hand, from the outset the majority view, which I have shared, has been that, whatever the undesirable features of the messy situation in Northern Ireland during the eight years of this process, peace, even imperfect peace, is ultimately preferable to a war that neither side could win.
Of course, one can argue that at several points during this period events could have been handled better by one or other or both of the two governments. But it is fair to say that given their joint objective, an end to the IRA's appalling campaign of violence, they did not have much room for manoeuvre - for it was inevitable that in this murky process that body would hold most of the cards.
Some have suggested that if decommissioning had not been elevated into such a crucial element of the negotiation, the IRA would have been deprived of what perversely became its trump card. For it has been the need to get that body's arms decommissioned that has given it so much leverage in the endless negotiations of recent years.
But, whatever chance there was of securing through a decommissioning of IRA weapons unionist participation in a Northern Ireland administration that would involve Sinn FΘin as well as the SDLP, the deep divisions within the majority community in Northern Ireland made it certain that there was no chance whatever of such an outcome being secured unless that issue was eventually faced.
Whatever may have been the case at an earlier stage in the conflict, by the 1990s it had also become clear that it was only through the participation of Sinn FΘin in the government of Northern Ireland that the principle of consent as a pre-condition of Irish political unification could be given solid and enduring form.
That participation, as well as Sinn FΘin acceptance, or at least tolerance, of a reformed policing process also provides by far the best prospect for a normalisation of life in Northern Ireland through the eventual ending of sporadic sectarian and gangster murders and street violence, and of the brutality of kneecapping and associated torture.
That in terms of temporary tolerance of such appalling practices the price of eventual normalisation of life in Northern Ireland has had to be so high is deeply distressing, not alone for the embattled unionist community in Northern Ireland but for all in Ireland who care about democracy and freedom. But that this has been the least bad way forward - I cannot bring myself to say the best - is equally clear to me, and I believe also to most Irish people.
All this has consequences for us in the Republic for which we may not be adequately prepared. I shall turn to that aspect of the matter on another day.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie