With luck, next week's election in Northern Ireland may be the last in which the national question - unity or Union? - is the dominant issue. Related questions, mistrustful legacies of decades of sectarian division and campaigns of violence remain unresolved.
But the signs are that the focus of politics has already shifted, with the Belfast Agreement and its resounding popular endorsement in last month's referendums.
If so, Bertie Ahern will take a share of the credit: he'll deserve it. But, as he looked to the future from the fastnesses of Ballyconnell this week, he must have had other, more ominous, concerns.
What the future holds for the Taoiseach will be determined by a minefield of tribunals and official inquiries, on the results of which depends the security of a suddenly shaky Coalition.
Mr Ahern may feel the Belfast Agreement and the referendums were less risky, if only because the results, one way or another, were bound to be clearer.
As it happened, they suggested a satisfactory measure of agreement. Most people, North and South, had come to accept that the national question could not be settled once and for all to everyone's satisfaction; not in a way that promised peace.
And, as the latest Irish Times/MRBI poll on the Assembly election clearly shows, by far the biggest challenge facing the parties is to achieve peace.
This would probably be defined as something more than the absence of violence; as stability, perhaps, or the chance to live with no more than the usual problems which beset everyone else.
What seems to have been agreed is that it is possible for the communities to live together, each with its own beliefs and aspirations but without constant reminders of difference and the divisive constitutional issues.
Those who imagine this will lead to a sudden blossoming of friendship among neighbours who have grown to fear and hate each other are bound to be disappointed.
The more realistic will nod across the boundaries of old suspicion, recognising that it's time to serve redundancy notices on those who've built careers, under cover of the national question(s), raising fears and breeding hatred.
We in the Republic are hardly in a position to make extravagant claims for the electoral system. Though we've had PR from the beginning, it has taken us a woefully long time to grow out of Civil War politics.
The PR system is one of the reasons it is necessary to refer to luck as well as the appeal of the parties in this election. Neither the choice nor the system is simple.
Unionists, for example, must decide first between parties which are for or against the agreement. The crux for supporters of the agreement is reached when they go on to decide between nationalists who share their views and unionists who don't.
The system, as old hands in the Republic know only too well, is at its best - its most sensitive and least predictable - when it comes to deciding the last seat or two in five- or six-seat constituencies.
It could be argued that the true level of support for the agreement will be reflected in the extent to which voters are willing to cross from traditional loyalty to rational choice when they mark their later preferences.
Much of the campaign sounded like a referendum rerun, but the competition between the SDLP and Sinn Fein has become sharper, though not yet as fierce as that between David Trimble and the anti-agreement allies, Ian Paisley and Bob McCartney.
One of the democratic advantages of PR is that it offers the Alliance Party, David Ervine's PUP, Gary Mc Michael's UDP, the Women's Coalition and Labour opportunities for which they worked long and hard in the discussions and negotiations which led to the agreement.
Now the most awkward and obvious problems for politicians and interest groups are those raised by disputed marches, release of prisoners, police reforms and decommissioning; all in a sense problems of the past, now calling for resolution, if not immediately, then inside two years.
For most, it will be a relief to get down to the issues which should occupy the Assembly and its executive in the long run; health, education and agriculture, for example.
In the DUP's television advertisements, Peter Robinson - who has David Ervine for an opponent in East Belfast - promises that when it comes to health, education and agriculture, his party will be "leading the charge for a better way of life."
Mr Robinson (and indeed politicians of all shades promising a better way of life in the North) might profitably look south these days. At least they'd learn what to avoid.
They'd discover that, for all its faults, theirs is a fairer and more open society than ours - and, though its sectarian divisions have alienated some citizens, it's less susceptible to financial and political scandals.
Though it has had 18 years of Thatcherism, as Alison O'Connor and Padraig O'Morain reported in The Irish Times this week, Northern Ireland still has better and more accessible health and welfare services than the Republic.
Some Southerners and many Northern nationalists may shrug and point to the records of unionist administrations: they didn't embrace social advance, it had to be forced on them.
How smug the critics of these hidebound administrations sound, especially in the light of Mary Harney's latest assault on those who depend on the fair-mindedness of this society and the services of this State.
Politicians of all parties have spent the week wondering what she's up to. First, she speaks of her astonishment at the discovery of some well-known names in the lists of those availing of questionable schemes, possibly to evade tax.
Then she suggests that the Coalition may be at risk - depending on what's discovered by the present series of inquiries, almost a dozen of which are being conducted by, or at the request of, her Department.
Finally, in a manner that reminds all of some of her most unfortunate contributions to the last general election campaign, she announces that certain people who refuse offers of work or training will have their social welfare payments cut off.
Her arguments on radio and television may have pleased economists of the far right or employers who make no secret of the low rates they pay their workers. To her opponents - and her partners - this was beginning to sound as if the Tanaiste was preparing her party for an election.
In Ballyconnell, Mr Ahern floundered on. Once more he promised a new approach to ethics in politics, which only reminded everyone of the other occasions on which he'd made the promise: after his election as party leader; before and after his election as Taoiseach; following the publication of the McCracken report; during and after the debate on Ray Burke's resignation . . .
Now I wonder why his promises about the introduction of a national minimum wage are being treated with scepticism.