Recently I heard a comment on a radio programme to the effect that conflict resolution takes a generation to take hold. It's an intriguing, if somewhat depressing, idea, that a whole new generation has to be born and grow to adulthood before peace becomes the norm.
So, in the context of the IRA putting arms verifiably beyond use, what age are the children of this new generation? Were they born in 1985 or 1994? Or are the 61 babies born the same day as Senator George Mitchell's son going to be the standard-bearers?
Without in any way wishing to take from the achievement announced this week, if we measure peace from the day that the violence which has haunted Northern Ireland becomes only a memory, we will have quite a wait for the patter of those little feet.
Another comment struck me forcefully this week, this time in print. It came from Joe Leichty's and Cecelia Clegg's recently published book, Moving Beyond Sectarianism - Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
The following quote was written well before the breakthrough this week, but nonetheless it makes for challenging reading:
"Despite the current 'peace process' and while applauding what has been achieved, it seems to us that the actual will to co-existence is not yet sufficiently broadly rooted to make peace a viable prospect." Leichty and Clegg are not speaking about the gargantuan efforts to be made by both nationalist and unionist leaders to bring their communities with them.
They are more concerned with the role religion, and more specifically the distortion of religion, has played in the Northern conflict.
This is a challenging and provocative book, because when it comes to sectarianism, in their view no one gets to claim innocence. Indeed, they pinpoint the more polite and innocuous forms of sectarianism as in some ways more insidious, and providing a framework where more bigoted and violent forms, such as the Holy Cross School protests, can flourish.
There is no doubt that their thesis will be controversial, and I am in disagreement with some of it myself.
However, I believe that they are absolutely right in allocating religion a central place in the conflict. Many people will be impatient with this approach, and will say the conflict is not about religion, but about class, or colonisation, or economics, or culture, or ethnicity.
Of course, it is about all of those things, but given the central role which religion plays in the lives of people in Northern Ireland, and how central it is to shaping identity, it has always puzzled me as to why there is a reluctance to name it as a conflict of religion.
Obviously, I am not saying that it is a conflict of doctrinal religion, of a desire for mass conversion of one tradition by another. But the unique nature of religious adherence in Northern Ireland explains much of the form which the strife has taken.
In common with Leichty and Clegg, I do not believe religion automatically leads to sectarianism, or that it is a cause of war in itself. However, the distortion of legitimate forms of belief and community-building must be implicated in what is happening in the North, and therefore churches must be active in the solution. Which, of course, many believers and churches already are, but much remains to be done.
The strength of their analysis lies in the identification of sectarianism as a system. As they say: "A sectarian system can be maintained by people who do not have a sectarian bone in their body." They want to move away from looking at the obviously sick and bigoted manifestations of sectarianism, which allows us to maintain the myth of the innocent majority and guilty few.
They define sectarianism in what they admit is an awkward and somewhat long-winded way. It is "a system of attitudes, actions, beliefs and structures, at personal, communal and institutional levels which always involves religion and typically involves a negative mixing of religion and politics.
This arises from a distorted expression of positive human needs, especially for belonging, identity and the free expression of difference.
"It is expressed in destructive patterns of relating: hardening the boundaries between groups, overlooking others, belittling, dehumanising or demonising others, justifying or collaborating in the domination of others, physically or verbally intimidating or attacking others."
Quite a mouthful.
When Leichty and Clegg began their five years of research under the title Moving Beyond Sectarianism, a perceptive person told them it would make Catholics feel smug, and Protestants feel got at. Well, they are unsparing in their list of potential sectarians, including secular liberal sectarians, who they say sometimes mirror the dynamic of the fundamentalists they abhor.
But conservative Protestants and Catholics, liberals and the ecumenically minded are all fingered as contributing to the problem, though it may be in diametrically different ways.
For example, a conservative Catholic may maximise the difference between traditions and do so in a way which excludes or demonises those who do not believe in the same way. However, a person involved in ecumenism may minimise differences which is also damaging because it is simplistic and reductionist.
One of the places I would part company with the authors is in their analysis of the Orange Order. Although scrupulously pointing out the Order's contribution to sectarianism, they say that to write off the whole organisation as incapable of change is to demonise it. They cite an Orangeman, a minister who spent the summer preaching charity to Catholics to his congregation. However, this strikes me as close to confusing the personal with the systemic.
No doubt there are many good, decent people within the organisation, but as a system, can it overcome its history of bigotry? I remain unconvinced, which may, of course, simply prove my own level of sectarianism.
It is an uncomfortable book, but not one without hope. They say that growth towards reconciliation will require the churches to move beyond building up their own communities, from what they term benign apartheid, to reaching systematically across the divide. Conflict resolution may take more than a generation. However, if this week's fragile political moves are not matched by personal and communal religious and civic initiatives, we may never find out how long it takes.
bobrien@irish-times.ie