Special reports

a reference to the failed power-sharing deal of 1973, which was brought down by the loyalist Ulster Workers Council strike in 1974.

But on that Good Friday in 1998, the independent chairman of the talks process, former US Senator George Mitchell said, with remarkable foresight, that implementation would be at least as difficult as agreement.  How right he was.

It's been a hard and rocky road since then, with the process continuing to be as much of a roller coaster as it always had been.

But eventually, the St Andrew's Agreement of late 2006 was fulfilled the following Spring, with Ian Paisley sitting beside Gerry Adams at Parliament Buildings (a remarkable sight to old hands like myself): and then devolution day itself in May.

So when the journalistic team got together to discuss what report we might compile for BBC Newsline, there was immediate consensus.  We agreed that what was important for the purposes of the piece was an accounting.  A simple two-fold question: is Northern Ireland a better place in the decade after the Good Friday Agreement was made (note for political anoraks: it was made, not signed.  No one signed that Agreement.): and, to put it simply, are we out of the woods yet?

Our conclusion, from all the people interviewed from right across Northern Ireland, was much as we expected. 

On one level, there's no argument.  Of course the place is immeasurably better: people are no longer dying day and daily:  and local devolved ministers, directly accountable to the local electorate, which was not the case with Direct Rule ministers, are taking decisions.

On another level, all our interviewees felt there was still an enormous amount of work to do in terms of getting two deeply divided communities to trust each other.

And these were people involved in classes dealing with sectarianism;  using traditional Irish and Ulster-Scots music and culture to explore differences and identity.  People at the coal face, in their own individual, quiet and unsung ways, doing what they can to heal the wounds of the past.

Some task.

There are 18 kilometres of peace lines in North Belfast alone.  People in places like the Fountain in Londonderry, the last protestant area on the City side of the Foyle, feel isolated and vulnerable.

My own personal view, as a journalist who's reported here in various roles for more than 30 years is this:  I think it will take generations - not years, and not decades - for those walls to come down in any real sense.  And even if the physical structures come down, then there are still the walls in people's minds.

Let's not be too bleak.  Northern Ireland is an infinitely better place than at any time since my childhood;  and that, let me tell you, is neither yesterday nor the day before.