Beside the television where Brendan Bradley watched the peace negotiations unfold are 10 photographs of murdered friends and relatives. "I was sitting there and I looked at them and it brought a tear to my eye because I thought `is that what the price of the Troubles was?'," says Mr Bradley, who has lost a brother, a sister, two nephews and an uncle to the violence of the past 30 years.
A founding member of the self-help group, Survivors of Trauma, Mr Bradley was 18 when his younger brother Francis was killed in 1975 in a UVF explosion in Belfast's Corporation Street.
His sister Isobel Leyland (41), was shot dead in north Belfast by a nationalist sniper during an attack on a joint British army/RUC foot patrol in 1992. She had settled in England to escape from the violence and was visiting her elderly mother when she was killed.
As Northern Ireland awoke to radio and television reports of a peace deal, Mr Bradley said he didn't feel he had the right to "stop or question the right of a society which wants to move on. We have something invested in peace and it's the blood of the people who died. We are survivors, we aren't victims. We know that our people are dead, but we have to live with it. We have to move on."
For survivors, sudden advances in the peace process brings mixed emotions, says the Rev David Clements, who is a management committee member of the women's Wave Trauma Centre in north Belfast.
"There will be a sense of increased sadness for some people in that they will be asking: `Why didn't this happen 25 years ago or at Sunningdale in 1974? If it had happened then, my brother, son or whatever would be alive.' But above all, there is a sense of optimism."
Mr Clements has felt these emotions himself: his RUC officer father was shot dead by the IRA along with a colleague in Ballygawley, Co Tyrone, in 1985. He said women in Wave could accept the phased early release of prisoners "if the paramilitaries will acknowledge the wrong that they have done and will repent in some very tangible way."
He said the voices of the North's victims, which have been sidelined and ignored by the Northern Ireland Office, needed to be heard.
"There have been people speaking quite directly on the part of prisoners, but who is pushing the agenda of the victims?"
According to Mr Clements, victims want actions rather than apologies. "I've always argued that decommissioning should be an act of repentance . . . I have said to [Sinn Fein chairman] Mitchel McLaughlin that even to hand over one ounce of Semtex, one bullet and one gun would be enough, but he said he didn't think that would be possible."
Mr Clements says he expects a surge in referrals to Wave as old wounds are reopened. Referrals to the group rose more than threefold after the first IRA ceasefire in August 1994, he said.
"Some of the people coming to us had been bereaved maybe 25 years ago and hadn't dealt with it and had been living in denial all that time and somehow coping. The ceasefire seemed to give them an opportunity to somehow resolve what was going on and I think we will see a rise in referrals after this settlement as well."