When a great deal of swallowing and lip biting is worth the effort

‘I WILL have to do a good deal of swallowing, I will have to do a good deal of biting my lip in future days. But I’m prepared to do that provided they cease to be terrorists." With these words, Ian Paisley may have opened the door to the possibility of a deal in Northern Ireland and closed the door on a lifetime of intransigence.

In Northern Ireland, nothing is ever exactly what it seems, but the importance of these extraordinary words from a man who has built a career and a political movement on opposition, negativity and bitterness should not be overlooked.

Strangely, the UK media has lost interest in Northern Ireland at the very time it is getting interesting. We stand, this week, on the verge of an agreement which will involve IRA decommissioning, an announcement of demilitarisation of the province by the British government and the restoration of power-sharing. This package may be the most seismic breakthrough since the Good Friday Agreement itself.

Expect political posturing and sabre-rattling. Those positive words from Mr Paisley came only a few days after his claim that the IRA should be "made to wear sackcloth and ashes" as humiliation for their crimes. There will be more to come as the DUP leader seeks to reassure his grassroots that he has not lost his firebrand image and has not been seduced by the process of negotiation. Hence the latest spat over whether there will need to be photographs of the IRA weapons or not. Don’t be fooled - this is no more than a chance for Messrs Adams and Paisley to flex their political muscle. Those angry exchanges may seem destructive but in fact they are crucial.

For the problem in Northern Ireland is a grassroots problem. It is not the politicians who cannot work together, but rather extreme core constituencies who are reluctant to take risks and who view every compromise as a sell-out. Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley coming to a cosy agreement is not credible in the macho world of Northern Ireland politics - there has to be at least a veneer of political combat. An agreement which lacks the usual cocktail of brinkmanship, crisis and hostility will immediately be suspected.

Grassroots members have to feel that their representatives have squeezed every conceivable advantage on their behalf. The sound and fury you will hear from Mr Adams and Mr Paisley are about creating the perception of winning concessions around the edges of the agreement and make all the difference. These public exchanges are a chance to reassure doubters.

When the last elections confirmed the DUP as the largest Unionist party and Sinn Fein the strongest voice of nationalism, many despaired that the peace process was at an end. In fact, it was a necessary staging post on the route to a lasting settlement, for although apparently polarised, the two parties representing more extreme opinion in Northern Ireland were forced to collide.

The DUP was immediately stripped of the luxury of opposition - there was no-one else to blame. Sinn Fein was forced to face its most implacable critic. Meeting David Trimble half-way is one thing, extending the hand of co-operation to Ian Paisley quite another.

Certainly, we were faced with a more divided political landscape - voters drifting away from the UUP and SDLP centre ground. But those results also appear to have forced those who criticised most to rise to the challenge of leadership.

There remain huge hurdles - not least in resolving the key strand of the Good Friday Agreement relating to north-south co-operation which was always the political dynamite in the accord. But the destruction of IRA weapons, the removal of British troops from Northern Ireland and the potential power sharing of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams - these are things that most of us never believed we could witness.

I started with a quote from Ian Paisley, and end with one from Gerry Adams. Last week, he put it thus: "The easy thing in republican west Belfast is to sound hardline. The easy thing in unionist Ballymena is to sound hardline. The difficult thing is to seize an opportunity and mould it, is to try and think through the other person’s experience and then try and make compromises and go together on that basis. I think we do have the opportunity to do that."

If Mr Adams means what he says and Mr Paisley can swallow hard, we just might be on the brink of something historic.