ABSTRACT
The political scene in Northern Ireland might have been forgiven for thinking it was business as usual in the region. Finding what had actually altered after April 1998 was not always a clear, straightforward task. Communal conflict and tension had continues to surface at or along many of the points of friction. The only question left in everyone's mind was whether the IRA would respond to the terms of Mitchell's review, evidence of which would appear early in the new year when the first review of the Independent International Decommissioning Commission under John de Chastelain was due to report. Nationalists and Republicans, and antiagreement Unionists such as Ian Paisley, see it as a victory for Irish Nationalism, putting in place the constitutional infrastructure upon which a united Ireland will emerge in the future and by consent, a fact underlined for the likes of Paisley by almost total unanimity of support for the agreement from within the Catholic community.
