Every parish in Ireland has its own version of Maggie and Johnny who had courted each other for more than 20 years until finally Maggie worked up the courage to put the question: "Johnny, don't you think it's time we got married?"
"I do, Maggie," says Johnny, "but sure who would take us?"
The story never did go on to tell what happened to Johnny and Maggie or if they just continued as before.
I am old enough to remember the days when everyone said that the Irish people would give the IRA anything, but they would never give it their vote. Well that changed and Sinn Féin has wrestled a good few votes out of the Irish people over the last few years. The Sinn Féin project, as they describe it, is to show that politics can work and in that revelation to finally take the gun out of Irish politics.
It is no easy thing to give up the gun, even when you have hardly used it in years. It isn't so much the pathetic but deadly power that comes from its barrel. That is reasonably easy to throw off. I can only ever remember meeting two Provos whom I considered to be psychopaths.
Decommissioning of weapons isn't even the issue. Admittedly that is more difficult because it involves principle and military integrity, but a few years ago when political ambition clashed with decommissioning, a methodology was found to bridge the conflicting needs. No, the thing that is most difficult to give up is the courtship and the attention that the gun attracts.
Republicans have become accustomed and comfortable with being courted and having their hand held. I know they have a different read on this and believe that they have been the instigators and the leaders of much, if not all, of the political innovations and changes of the last 10 years. It isn't true. They have grown so used to having their hand held as they walk the political highways and laneways that they now take it for granted.
In the '70s and '80s I remember hundreds of emissaries knocking at republican doors late at night seeking a stay of execution or a few days' ceasefire.
I remember their blindness to the radical transformation achieved by Garret FitzGerald in the Anglo-Irish Agreement. I was close enough to watch John Hume almost destroy his political career and party as he argued and cajoled them into considering a ceasefire.
I was in awe, and so were they, with the businesslike ruthlessness of Albert Reynolds as he drove them into a ceasefire and then drove the British into the Downing Street Declaration. I admired the astuteness and the generosity of the SDLP in framing the Belfast Agreement.
As the momentum of the politics increased so too the stature of the courtship, right up to and into the White House and Downing Street. And common to all these suitors, from the anonymous midnight callers to Bill Clinton, was the desire to see republicans give up the gun.
None of this is to underestimate the contribution made by the present leadership of republicanism.
During all these journeys it, for the most part, kept its following intact and transformed an army into a busy and efficient political machine. It has not yet become a normal political party where diversity and allegiance form a mature tension. The gun, or at least the threat of the gun, still informs the dynamic.
It is not easy to give up the gun, for who can guarantee that the courtship will continue when the gun is no longer there? Republicans were correct in identifying the need to make politics work in order to remove the gun, but what they have always failed to acknowledge is that a moment would arrive when they would have to wed themselves to one or the other.
They rightfully identified the responsibility of others to create and develop a political dynamic but were less forthright and insightful of how and when they would wed themselves to that dynamic, leaving politics and politics only, both in sickness and in health.
They have displayed a tendency to see politics as a science that would supply concrete, empirical outcomes, when the reality is that the most politics can supply is a probability that still demands imagination and creativity.
It is only at that moment when the question demands a Yes or No answer, it is only then that it becomes crystal clear how difficult it is to replace something as tangible and objective as the gun with something as flexible and subjective as politics. But that moment has arrived and an answer is demanded.
I am very confident that the wedding is going to be announced next week and if the Irish people have any sense, they will light bonfires from Dingle to Drumcree, but just in case "nerves" were to set in, republicans would be well advised to remember that the two governments know that there are no more suitors out there and could as easy as not tell the IRA what to do with its guns.
Denis Bradley is vice-chairman of the North's Policing Board and lives in Derry.