When I chose this title early in January 2000, the institutions established under the Good Friday Agreement were in place and beginning to work. Although the 31 January deadline for General de Chastelain's report on decommissioning was looming, it was possible to hope that by then Sinn Féin would have been able to offer, if not a start to IRA decommissioning, at least enough of an outline timetable for it to enable the general to present a genuinely positive report.

So my intention was to trace the beginnings of the current peace process back as far as the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 – the Hillsborough Agreement; to compare that Agreement with the one reached at Belfast on Good Friday 1998; and to consider in what directions further progress was needed before one could begin to talk with confidence about a ‘settlement’ of the Irish question having been achieved.

The situation today, with the Good Friday institutions suspended and the IRA having withdrawn from all contacts with General de Chastelain's commission, has rendered such an intention somewhat unreal. Northern Ireland has been plunged back into crisis and there is an ugly possibility that the Belfast Agreement, and the whole approach on which it was based, is facing collapse. It may nevertheless be useful – and help to put the current impasse into perspective – to compare the two Agreements and the rationale behind them. But the question posed in my title now seems decidedly more premature than it did a couple of months ago. So instead of answering it, I shall end by offering a few – necessarily gloomy – reflections on the present stalemate.

In the autumn of 1983, when the preliminary negotiations leading to the Hillsborough Agreement began, the British government had run out of ideas for tackling the Northern Ireland problem. The collapse of the Sunningdale arrangements in 1974 had demonstrated the impracticability of imposing constitutional arrangements which required unionist cooperation in order to work, and which the unionist majority was determined to resist. The SDLP had refused to operate any arrangements which did not include an ‘Irish dimension’; and the introduction of such a dimension remained blocked by adamant unionist opposition.