That agreement failed to hold. But the people of Northern Ireland have since then so profoundly changed the province and defied its quarrelsome politics that the IRA's latest move was in a certain sense forced upon it. The IRA declared an end to its violent campaign for a united Ireland and a commitment to a political solution to the Irish question on Thursday - an action that prompted both praise and skepticism. "They have seen the benefits of peace and normality," Mitchell said after the IRA's statement. "They couldn't go back to the way it was, and, in my judgment, no politician could ever take them back. In effect, the public has dragged the politicians along in their wake." The public's expectations of peace since the late 1990s have indeed proved powerful. While a comprehensive settlement may be years away, scholars and other experts say, the IRA's statement this time is being taken as its most thoroughgoing commitment to ending its lengthy war against Britain. The government in Belfast that was proposed in 1998, designed on a formula that divided power between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority, was the centerpiece of the earlier agreement, but it lasted only until 1999. Repeated efforts to get it up and running since then have fallen victim to political feuding. But during that time Northern Ireland's society surged forward, capitalizing on the agreement and the end to systematic sectarian violence that resulted from cease-fires by the IRA and its Protestant paramilitary counterparts. The IRA's renunciation of violence, in effect, was the logical outcome of this interim. "A lot of people now have a lot invested in Northern Ireland not going back to what it was," said Richard English, professor of politics at Queen's University in Belfast. "There was critical mass pressure on politicians," English added, "saying, 'Whatever you do, we don't want to go back to the time when you saw a hotel being built and assumed it would be blown up a month later, and every time you switched on the radio somebody had been murdered in the city center."' Central Belfast used to be a dark place of derelict buildings and shuttered storefronts where venturing out in the soccer jersey of a team representing one "tradition" in Northern Ireland could make the wearer the target of a gunman from the other "tradition." These days, construction cranes dot the horizon, stately old courthouses have been restored, riverside hotels and convention centers have risen and the streets are thronged with people who have returned to the province after departing in despair over past decades. "It used to feel as if there were a curfew after dark," English said. "Now people fly in from England and Scotland for the weekend night life." Mitchell, speaking by telephone from Maine, said he had been in Belfast two weeks ago and found it "completely different." "When I first started going there, you never saw a crane, there was little construction anywhere, and everything was generally negative," he said. "Now there has been a total economic transformation, with unemployment rates lower than they have ever been and a tremendous energy." Martin McGuinness, chief negotiator of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, acknowledged the importance of the changes on the ground though insisting that the credit for producing them belonged to the party's leader, Gerry Adams. Speaking from Washington, where he was briefing members of the U.S. Congress, McGuinness said, "There is no doubt that people felt much less afraid than before, much more confident about building their lives and businesses and that, despite the problems besetting the political process, they believed the peace process would continue." David McKittrick, author of many books on Northern Ireland, said that for the IRA, which had always resisted any move that might connote surrender, the appearance of peace on the ground offered a defensible way out. "In giving this up, they weren't beaten, they were given an alternative way to reach their goal," he said. "The guns had become an obstacle and the alternative was politics, not capitulation." Throughout the day Thursday, residents and politicians, long familiar with dashed hopes, spoke about the IRA move with a wariness that even emerges in the harsh accent of Northern Ireland, a crabbed and unforgiving version of the lilting way people speak south of the border. "Everyone is in some way haunted by the Troubles and the sense that things might end up badly, and they don't allow euphoria to get the better of them," English said. "Northern Ireland is a place where people always suspect the worst motives; they don't go leaping about in the streets." English, the author of an authoritative 2003 history of the IRA, said that its statement was "as clear a declaration of the end of the war as you're going to get." But he warned that progress would still be slow. "Given the problems of trust and timing in Northern Ireland, we will need at least five years to see whether this is the beginning of moving to complete peace," he said. He also cautioned that peace in Northern Ireland came with limitations. "This remains a sectarian place where differences are dealt with somberly and people don't necessarily like each other," he said. "But they no longer go around shooting people - they believe differences can be dealt with in a nonviolent way." He said that people used to fear coming to Belfast from London, but now the reverse was true. "Belfast," he said, "has ceased being famous for what it was famous for."