More than 10 years on, there are still arguments about the origins of the "peace process". The phrase itself is contentious, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
But for many in Northern Ireland, the essentials are that the killing has stopped, that the mucky, glorious, miserable and mundane business of life can go on without the need to look over a shoulder at a car which slows down in a dark street, or feel dread when someone is late coming home.
The rest is for anoraks: the will of the people is get it done and tell us when it's settled.
Only a minority want details of possible deals to restore power-sharing at Stormont. Those who try to see the broader picture accurately, and make it accessible and comprehensible, are tiring in two senses: running out of energy, and even in their/our own ears becoming steadily more boring.
Cue lights, cameras, action, and the arrival at the centre of events of a force of nature. Absorbing the fact of a dominant Ian Paisley, some way after the election last autumn which gave him primacy in unionism, has soaked up much of what energy remains.
Broadly speaking, the argument about developments this far pitches the view that republicans are progressively ditching violence and should be encouraged, against the contention that their continuing existence as an organisation with both armed and political wings, and the shifts to bring them into politics are having poisonous effects North and South.
Always stronger south of the Border, the argument has just had its most vigorous - and most telling - outing, on the issue of the proposed early release of Garda Jerry McCabe's killers.
The anger evident on the ground completed a picture of patience draining away north, south and in London with Sinn Féin's bottomless expectations.
Even some of those who for years argued that the IRA hanging on to its arms was essential for republican coherence, have begun to say that enough's enough.
Then Ian Paisley arrives as the next element in need of encouragement and support. Hyperactive and demanding, he has dominated this week and last, daily outbursts burning up much of the oxygen remaining in the process.
Some other players have begun to look and sound a bit dizzy. Did nobody warn the Taoiseach and his Minister for Foreign Affairs that attempting to mollify Paisley has only ever invited demands for deeper grovelling?
The giddy limit may have been his "information" that the IRA intended to trump his demand for photographs by rapid decommissioning: the suspicion was that he had over-interpreted a bit of mischief by the most recent historian of Sinn Féin, Brian Feeney, who recommended to the IRA in an Irish News column that they "shoot the DUP fox" by getting rid of their armoury double-quick, leaving nothing for the cameras.
Maybe, belatedly, this is the "waking up to reality" DUP figures predicted with such triumphalism when they pushed David Trimble's Ulster Unionists into second place. For all the assessment then of the combination of Sinn Féin and DUP as new leaders of their respective communities, and the many profiles of Ian Paisley, what his leadership of the largest party and his emergence as potential First Minister entails has only begun to sink in.
Glorying in his late run and a remarkable, if perhaps fragile, physical recovery, he has given the comparatively uninitiated a glimpse of most of the set-pieces in his repertoire.
For most of the audience, beyond his faithful followers, it is an unnerving vista.
Those who had avoided thinking about it, as well as those who strove mightily to acclimatise to the scenario of a pragmatic Peter Robinson as First Minister, the leader having initialled the deal, are still off-balance.
The impression that the DUP coop is also full of headless chickens does little to steady nerves, dependent on the premise that Mr Robinson, and not the man making the nomination, would be the party's nominee for the job. With hindsight, of course, against all Ian Paisley's history of oppositionism and of choosing the easy option of sniffing out and inveighing against compromise, there might be irresistible appeal in the declaration "I nominate . . . myself".
It may never happen. The unravelling may gather pace. Sorting out the resulting tangle and knitting it back into shape, may outlast the DUP leader's return to health. Who knows what will remain of his party without that huge energising force, or with his shadow hanging over them. That uncertainty may have much to do with the other spectacle of the past fortnight - that of Gerry Adams and associates yearning to deliver the deal, saying so in a multitude of ways, in need only of the slightest cover for a climbdown on the presentation, not the fact, of the IRA's final decommissioning.