David McKittrick: For all the doubts, peace is taking hold in Ireland

A lot of older folk in Belfast probably never thought they'd live to see the situation of Northern Ireland being held up as an example of a successful and effective peace process. Yet both Tony Blair and George Bush referred to it in those terms, and their words carried conviction that was more than a ritual summit communiqué. For once, rhetoric and reality coincide: Northern Ireland, once a byword for lethal intractability, now has a successful peace process.

A lot of people in Belfast persist in saying the bottle is half empty rather than half full, yet all but the most ingrained pessimists grudgingly concede that things are getting steadily better. The best bit is that hardly anyone is getting killed any more. The Ulster Defence Association, the loyalist paramilitaries that have been responsible for most deaths in recent years, has rid itself of the murderous clown Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair. It is now observing a 12-month ceasefire.

The organisation still holds killers and drug-dealers and many men with more tattoos than brains. Yet even some dim figures have finally figured out that the days of large-scale killing sprees are in the past. They are not giving up violence altogether but they have grasped that even in the tough ghettos there is less tolerance of it.

This is real progress and now, in terms of both the IRA and the overall political process, there is the chance of a double breakthrough – maybe within the next few weeks, maybe on a historic scale.

The dream scenario goes like this: London and Dublin will tomorrow make the IRA an offer; the IRA goes for it and moves irrevocably towards politics; the Unionists, impressed by this, go back into government with Sinn Fein. A new era then opens in which politics has primacy over paramilitarism.

Even if this all comes true, Northern Ireland is never going to turn into a sleepy backwater. It has generated too much hatred, seen too much conflict and too many deaths; it groans under the weight of too much history for that. But even if things do not obligingly fall into place by the summer, the lack of a breakthrough will produce little sense of crisis and no sense that a last chance for peace has gone.

This is because things already seem so much closer to peace than to war. Although it is all too easy to envisage further sporadic violence, nobody really thinks that the lack of a breakthrough will mean a return to the bad old days.

The peace, imperfect as it is, has bedded in to the extent that nobody sees it any more as a matter of life and death. The alternative to success this time round is not war but simply a postponement until the autumn, when it will be tried again and when it may well work.

If this sounds over-confident, it is based on a sense that most of the politicians in most of the parties actively want to do business with each other. That certainly does not mean they have learnt to like or trust each other, just that they have come to feel they can thrash out their differences by political means.

To be more specific, it means the republican movement wants to get the Assembly and devolved government up and running again. So when Mr Blair and the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, return to Belfast again tomorrow – they must have season tickets by now – they will launch a document which they hope will trigger, if that is the right word, a serious IRA response.

If the IRA does deliver, by indicating that it will move away from paramilitarism and decommission weaponry as a symbol of this, then the game is on. The IRA move had better be good, because it will have to be enough to help David Trimble overcome the hardliners in his party and persuade the party to go back into government. It will have to convincingly signify that a new phase is beginning.

Mr Blair has not insisted on the disbandment of the IRA but he has pressed for "acts of completion" to demonstrate that it is jettisoning its bad old habits, and indeed eventually its guns. Since salesmanship is not among Mr Trimble's attributes, any IRA response will have to be good enough to sell itself to Unionists on its own merits. The Unionist party's inveterate rejectionists will have to be left without much ammunition.

If all this works then it's into fresh Assembly elections at the end of next month. Mr Trimble must hold off challenges both from within his own party and from Ian Paisley, while Sinn Fein is putting huge effort into an attempt to become the largest nationalist party. What on earth would happen, for example, should Mr Paisley's party and Sinn Fein come out on top? Few can imagine them managing to work together in any meaningful way. Major new uncertainties thus lie ahead, with endless scope for more delay, blustering, bickering and backbiting.

It is hard to imagine Northern Ireland as a completely stable society, because of its history and because Unionists and nationalists have such different goals. Since no one can know whether it is destined to remain within the UK, or someday join a united Ireland, its politics will always be much more combative than politics in Britain.

Yet the sense is gradually growing that, if this peace process can keep on delivering, its politics can remain combative but cease to be lethal. That would indeed confirm it as a peace process worth prizing.

The writer was named Northern Ireland Journalist of the Year in the IPR/BT Press Awards