Last week Mr Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein claimed that Ulster unionism was on its last legs, deeply split and demoralised. There is no doubt as to the split, although this has been with us since the days of Terence O'Neill.
But there is some doubt as to the demoralisation; half of the unionist community is pessimistic about the future, the other half, the section which elected David Trimble and Seamus Mallon as First Minister and Deputy First Minister respectively, is looking forward to the autumn with a keen if nervous sense of anticipation. This notwithstanding genuine fears about the peaceful intent of the republican movement, and genuine fears, too, about the emotional impact of the early release of prisoners.
Mr McGuinness was perhaps trying to raise the spirits of his own followers. His difficulty is an obvious one; Sinn Fein entered the talks last September with the explicitly stated objective of removing the British state's claim to jurisdiction in Ireland. The Northern Ireland Bill, when published, revealed a rather dramatic lack of success in this area.
It tells us: "The executive power in Northern Ireland shall continue to be vested in Her Majesty. As regards transferred matters, the prerogative and other executive functions of Her Majesty in relation to Northern Ireland shall be exercisable on Her Majesty's behalf by the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister acting jointly. If and to the extent that those Ministers so determine, those functions shall be exercised through the Northern Ireland Ministers and the Northern Ireland Departments".
These ministers, Sinn Fein now insists, must include Sinn Fein ministers. By any logic, Sinn Fein now aspires to exercise power on "Her Majesty's behalf": nothing reveals more the relatively non-ideological nature of Northern republicanism, much more concerned with recognition and status than the Southern variety.
Sometimes the full drama of the Northern Ireland settlement is inadequately grasped. Words like "accommodation", "reconciliation", even "historic compromise" do not fully convey it: a political class which has supported an armed group for 25 years, tried to overthrow the state by physical means is now to be incorporated within that state as part of its governing elite.
The price of this degree of acceptance of the republican leadership's electoral mandate is, however, a high one. "Minimum" republican requirements for a settlement defined as late as this spring have been jettisoned: Article 2, as well as Article 3, have been redesigned as part of the recognition by the Irish people of the legitimacy of the choice made by the majority of the people of Northern Ireland as to whether they wish to remain in the UK or join a united Ireland.
Hence the current mood of unease (to use Mr Adams's word) within republicanism reflected in increasingly edgy public pronouncements and, above all, in an unwillingness to declare that the war is over.
Mr Adams has said that the republican movement can only accept this settlement on the basis that it is transitional to a united Ireland. Naturally, he has laid particular emphasis on the cross-Border institutions in this respect: Sinn Fein wants to provide ministers so that they can participate in these bodies.
In a recent interview, however, Mr Mitchel McLaughlin, while stressing his view that "this is a time-limited arrangement that allows for a peaceful transference of the current political reality of two states on this island into an all-Ireland one" was also typically realistic on this point. When asked "But you cannot get a guarantee from either government that this is a transitional phase?" he replied: "I do not think we even sought that".
Currently, the relaxed signals emanating from the Ulster Unionist Party tend to suggest that the actual establishment of the cross-Border arrangements agreed in the Stormont agreement will not present any great problems this autumn.
But this entirely desirable development of republican flexibility has its counterpart in movement on the unionist side. When the Framework Document was published in February 1995, David Trimble declared against it on the grounds that he did not want a closer association with the Irish State. Since March of this year he has been promising an end to the internal Irish cold war.
Some republican writers in recent days have taken comfort in the speculation that Trimble's "conversion" owes much to some rough pressure exerted behind the scenes by Tony Blair, although no convincing evidence of this has emerged. In retrospect, some of the indications of Trimble's willingness to do a deal were obvious long before the Labour landslide, and certainly long before the Good Friday deal.
In the summer of 1994, in a parliamentary brief article, Trimble indicated a willingness to trade the Government of Ireland Act for changes in Articles 2 and 3. His first public act as new leader in 1995, the decision to welcome the former IRA man turned democratic politician, then cabinet minister, Proinsias De Rossa to Glengall Street paved the way for his celebrated "people can change" theme of his acceptance speech as First Minister.
In 1996 he accepted George Mitchell as talks chairman in defiance of Paisley and McCartney. For a year at least it has been clear that Trimble believed that a satisfactory model of cross-Border co-operation could be elaborated. It is true that he always retained a belief that the constitutional deal had to be negotiated, in essence, with the SDLP and the two governments. But this, in essence, is what happened on the Thursday before Good Friday: the overnight concessions won by Sinn Fein on prisoners and decommissioning do not alter that fact. In working with David Trimble, then, Tony Blair has always been working with the grain.
The significance of the Labour landslide is, however, real enough. When it came to selling the deal to doubting unionists, always the really hard part, Trimble was strengthened by a widespread feeling that the days of trying to solve the Northern Ireland problem by playing high politics at Westminster a la Lord Molyneaux by exploiting the balance of power were quite simply over. It also helped that both Mo Mowlam and Paul Murphy, the Political Development Minister, were so keen to place Northern Ireland's devolution plan in the context of the Scottish and Welsh proposals.
It could all still go wrong. A large section of the traditional Ulster Unionist Party constituency has moved in a more liberal direction in order to reach an understanding with Catholic nationalism; but Northern nationalism is still an impatient turbulent force. It should be noted that SDLP transfers to Sinn Fein do not, to say the least, run at a lower level in the late 1990s as compared with the early 1980s.
In that respect the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 failed to stabilise the North. The habit of sectarian contestation is deeply ingrained on both sides; we have the Portadown Orangemen to remind us of that.
It remains necessary to spell it out. This agreement is, as Robin Wilson of Democratic Dialogue put it, a "compromise compromise", not a unionist compromise or a nationalist compromise, and it implies that the days of the absolutist condemnation of one side or the other are over. But there are a lot of people who, this summer, are showing that they are having some difficulty in coming to terms with this reality.