By John Spain

The Northern Secre-tary Peter Hain had threatened to pull the plug on devolution if the Monday deadline for setting up an administration was passed. But as far as people here are concerned, if Adams and Paisley are doing the business, they don’t care if it takes another six months, never mind a mere six weeks.

Clearly the Irish and British governments felt the same way. As soon as Adams and Paisley had their successful meeting on Monday, the two governments agreed to accommodate the new target date of May 8 for the restoration of the power-sharing administration in the North. Emergency legislation was introduced in Westminster on Tuesday to give effect to the agreement between the DUP and Sinn Fein and the new timetable.

Hain said the DUP commitment to share power in May was a historic development. “This is the first time the DUP has said they will share power with Sinn Fein,” he said. “People said this would never happen and it is a breakthrough. We are in entirely new territory.”

Both Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed, as did everyone else. Ahern said the agreement had “the potential to transform the future of the island.” Blair said it was “historic, a remarkable coming together of people who have been so strongly opposed in the past.”

Seeing Adams and Paisley side by side at their press conference had an air of unreality about it. People even seasoned news reporters who have been writing about the North for 20 or 30 years stared at their TVs in disbelief.

It was hard to comprehend that it was finally happening. After 3,700 dead the Northern Troubles were finally being consigned to history.

We have known for some time that Adams and Sinn Fein were ready. But Paisley, given the bitterness in the community behind him caused by 30 years of IRA murder, maiming and mayhem, was slower to be convinced that the time was right, that republicanism had fully embraced democracy.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Monday’s historic and public agreement between the two to share power was Paisley’s lack of rancor and the mutual respect between himself and Adams.

It was hard to believe, but Paisley had finally said Yes. Dr. No had metamorphosed into Dr. Yes. His transition from rabble-rouser to peacemaker was complete.

John Hume, as stunned as the rest of us on Monday, remembered one heated exchange years ago between himself and Paisley. Hume had remarked at the time that if the word “no” were removed from the English language, Paisley would be rendered speechless. Paisley responded, “NO I wouldn’t!”

Never say never, they say. The man who famously roared Never! Never Never! years ago was talking softly on Monday and being politely positive about Sinn Fein at the press conference at Stormont.

If the walls of the famous bastion of unionism could have talked they might have recalled that this was the same man who once threw snowballs at the then Taoiseach Sean Lemass when he had the cheek to pay a courtesy call on Northern Prime Minister Terence O’Neill at Stormont!

But that was then, years ago, and this is now. The pity is that it’s taken so long.

Paisley and the Ulster Workers sank the first power-sharing administration led by Brian Faulkner. The Shinners’ IRA buddies (who would not decommission in time) sank the second one led by David Trimble by giving Paisley a way to undermine it.

Perhaps it had to go to the extremes to get the 30-year mess resolved, with Sinn Fein surpassing the SDLP and the Democratic Unionists wiping out the official Unionists. With nowhere else to go, the two extremes sized each other up, wrestled with their consciences and their histories ... and decided to share power between them.

The sad thing is that it could have happened 30 years ago and we would have been saved all the slaughter that has gone on in the meantime. But this is not a time for recrimination. It’s a time for celebration that it’s happened at last.

One of the encouraging signs on Monday was the business-like manner of Paisley and Adams. Immediately their priorities were the bread and butter issues for the North how many billions they can squeeze out of British Chancellor Gordon Brown in an economic package to back up the new deal, and how to get rid of the water charges that were about to be introduced across the North.

Brown some time ago announced that, if the deal was done, there would be a £35 billion sterling package for the North over the next five years. A further £1 billion was added to that recently as an immediate bonus if Monday’s deadline was achieved (and since it has been, give or take six weeks, that means the overall five year package for economic development is £36 billion).

The Irish government is putting in more than *500 million immediately as part of this support deal (and they have done so without asking the taxpayers like me, but we will let that pass for the moment). Few people here will begrudge the money if it helps to transform the North, but it should not be forgotten that it is money that is desperately needed down here for schools and hospitals.

In spite of all the billions that are being promised, however, it ain’t enough for Paisley and Adams, who want more. In particular, they want to be sure that it is all genuinely extra investment, on top of the existing annual U.K. subvention for the North, now running at around £6.5 billion a year. (That’s what it costs to keep the North going, thanks in no small part to all the bar stool activists on both sides up there who have never worked in their lives.)

The sums of money involved in all of this are mind-boggling. The Northern economy is a basket case, heavily dependent on the public sector.

One-third of people with jobs work for the state. Almost 70% of economic activity in the North revolves around the public sector, compared to 40% in the rest of the U.K. and 37% in the Republic.

In a weird way, the Troubles protected people up there from the financial realities that workers in Britain or the U.S. have faced in the last three decades. People in the North are stuck in the state-support time warp of the socialist 1960s. There is a lack of entrepreneurship.

More than 95% of business in the North is classified as small or medium, with few bigger companies. A third of the Fortune 500 companies have a base in the Republic, but only one or two have an operation in the North.

Ahern has said that Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom could become an all-island phenomenon. But there’s a long way to go. The south has got huge foreign inward investment in comparison with the North and one of the reasons, of course, is our 12.5% corporation tax regime.

Paisley wants this to be introduced in the North companies there pay 18% or even a lot more if they do not qualify for special breaks. But a single rate of corporate tax for the whole island may be difficult to achieve.

Brown is a Scot and there are large parts of Scotland as poor as Northern Ireland who will want to be included in any tax deal that’s going for the North. So the chancellor has to watch his back.

Even so, something like this probably will happen in time. And in the meantime it will be great listening to Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Fein grappling with real life problems and finite budgets, the kind of real world problems that the rest of us have to live with everyday.

It’s a lot harder than bombs and bigotry.