The title of this lecture is intended to suggest the underlying rationale of the Northern Ireland Agreement – that no one tradition should be allowed to dominate the other, but that both should have equal respect. It should be read as plural and inclusivist rather than narrow and exclusivist: both march and jig should continue, but not in competition and not at each other's expense. A slightly sobering footnote to the cultural nuances of continuing division is the failure to secure a common name in popular usage for the Agreement itself. For nationalists it is the Good Friday Agreement. Unionists, particularly those who do not like it, refer more prosaically to the Belfast Agreement.

The extent of the progress achieved in the last six months may be measured against the fact that two years ago, and even later, it was still possible to describe the state of political negotiations in Northern Ireland in terms of a late Beckett play. There was a bleak landscape, an empty stage, a bunch of nondescript and dispirited characters, a lack of dramatic movement, and meaningful dialogue reduced to a monosyllabic minimum. I entitled an earlier version of this talk by reference to a classic book on negotiation by Roger Fisher of the Harvard Law School. He called it Getting to Yes. Given the tortuous, tortoise-like and entirely tentative progress of the Northern Ireland peace process, and a lack of clear definition of where it was going, I thought that a description of these procedures might only merit the title Creeping to Maybe. Then, as movement on the ground became apparent, a more upright stance seemed justified, and a more optimistic title: Staggering to Perhaps.

For a long time people in Northern Ireland (at least those who accepted that there was a problem) took the view that there was indeed an answer out there but that it was somebody else's job to find it. This has deep roots. The literary figure for this phenomenon appears in The Tain. Thomas Kinsella's translation presents perhaps the stereotype of the dour, uncommunicative, bloody-minded Ulsterman, unable to compromise and unwilling to admit that he will not do so. Cúchulainn has been killing the Connaught men and they send representatives to sue for peace.