Unfortunately, hope and history do not always rhyme. While anticipatory references to the historic nature of Tuesday's proceedings did great credit to public-spirited enthusiasm for decisive progress in the peace process, the day was an object lesson in the dangers of trying to make instant evaluations of historical importance, writes Martin Mansergh
The sequencing of steps after months of intensive negotiation can very easily break down, and can be nearly as difficult to complete, as a clear round in a high-level show-jumping competition.
There has been criticism of the process, which focused latterly on negotiations with the two parties that had difficulties with the two governments' joint declaration of last April. In my experience, involving some or all of the other parties in this type of negotiation makes little difference to the outcome.
One wonders why the SDLP could not confidently make more of a virtue of the fact that they are not part of the problem and have already fully signed up to the solution.
Effective negotiation is nearly always a series of bilaterals or trilaterals, with different parties, within a multilateral framework that, however, needs to remain visible. In the EU Common Fisheries Policy negotiations, the Commission and the Presidency were negotiating at the end over the Irish Box with the Irish and the Spanish, not the Germans or the Austrians.
It has been encouraging that there has been relatively little indulgence in the blame game. As negotiations reach a climax, there are nearly always one or two issues that remain to be resolved at the last minute, and in most negotiations (e.g. EU or social partnership) one can be relatively confident that they will be.
The final stage of Northern Ireland negotiations, where two parties in particular choose to play hardball to the end, often becomes unstuck for that reason.
It is clear that this time, while everything else was pretty well agreed, what the IRA would do - and what de Chastelain would be able to say about it - was a major and crucial factor of uncertainty.
Confidentiality is consistent with the decommissioning scheme approved by both parliaments. Gen de Chastelain has been very disciplined, and has managed to achieve great progress by behaving discreetly and by retaining the confidence of his paramilitary interlocutors.
The downside is that a sceptical unionist public has not been able to form any real assessment of whether major inroads have been made into the paramilitary arsenals or not.
It ought to be possible, without getting into detailed numerical inventories in public, to permit much better qualitative assessment of what has been done to date.
There is a temptation to hold back a little, to preserve the mystique, to shelter volunteers as long as possible from the radical changes of role and behaviour that completion of the peace process will inevitably require.
Yet the IRA membership should look on their contribution not as humiliation but as part of a courageous enterprise, which lends the republican movement and its leadership much credit.
Their most vocal critics miss one point. The more they remind people of horrible tragedies in which the IRA were involved, the more that underlines the achievement in having been able with the help of others to move on to a constructive and agreed political path.
Dissidents miss another equally vital point. They naturally try to highlight the distance the movement has travelled away from basic objectives formulated as simple ultimatums.
Instead of a purely notional ideological proximity to a united Ireland, the republican movement with others has reached a level of real engagement with the representatives of what was until recently an utterly hostile tradition, that was not on speaking terms with them, but whose co-operation is required.
Gerry Adams in his statement appealed to the wider republican family. Someone like Ruairí Ó Bradaígh has influence that might help bring much of the remaining republican dissident paramilitary activity to an end, and in that context his party's model for the future could at least have an acceptable place in political discussion.
Cries of "Treachery!" on the other hand only confirm the impression of a hopelessly beached faction, washed up and left behind by the tide of history.
Not for the first time in political negotiations, the Ulster Unionists developed cold feet at the last minute, even in response to what is likely to have been a very substantial IRA gesture.
The danger in that type of approach is that it could encourage the republican belief that even far-reaching moves on their part are likely to be misrepresented and spurned. The scope for mutual and embarrassing miscalculation has to be reduced.
Unionism has taken centre-stage in the demand for adherence to full democratic standards within a finite time frame. Irish democrats have an equal interest in that, and it will embrace loyalist organisations as much as republican ones.
The point of the monitoring commission is that unionists should not again take it on themselves to bring the institutions to a standstill if there are controversial security incidents.
Whether or not the language employed by republicans is new, the intentions and the actions behind the words have to be. There is more to be gained from the continuous momentum of working institutions than from frequent stop-starts to negotiate the price of each inch moved forward towards the goal of paramilitary closure.
Political discourse assumes that either nationalists or unionists will prevail in the longer term on the outstanding constitutional question. But suppose instead their political paths were to converge? I have great faith that the Irish and those in the North now representing themselves as "simply British" can work together, not just in lesser things but in greater things as well.