In October 1993, in the Sinn Fein office on the Falls Road in Belfast, Gerry Adams scrambled on to a desk and -- in front a group of startled journalists -- began reciting a poem by Walt Whitman.

"O Captain! my Captain!" declaimed Adams, "our fearful trip is done; the ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won."

The incident was recalled this week in the Guardian. The newspaper had asked all those who had held the post of Northern Ireland correspondent since the position was initiated in 1968 to jot down their personal memories and their reaction to last week's act of decommissioning by the IRA.

It was that newspaper's way of writing 'Fin' at the end of those 33 years. More than anything, more than the 1994 IRA ceasefire, more than the Good Friday Agreement, more than the establishment of the cross-community Northern Executive and Assembly, it was the IRA's unseen act last week that had lifted the curtain on Northern Ireland's future, finally severed the umbilical cord that connected violent past with non-violent, uncertain present.

Straddling two continents, it was Martin McGuinness in the US and Gerry Adams in Belfast who held either handle of the scissors as the act was done. As ever, the sense of politics as theatre -- with republicans at centre stage -- was present.

McGuinness chose the White House as his potent backdrop; Adams gave the world's media a full five hours to array themselves before him as he made his fin de guerre address.

Had Sinn Fein and the IRA waited just one more week, the symbolism, the sense of journey travelled would have been even more potent. Wednesday October 31 marks the 20th anniversary of the most famous address ever delivered at a Sinn Fein ard fheis, a speech that prefigured, even mirrored, Adams's Belfast address of last week. It was, arguably, the first intimation that the war was heading towards the endgame.

'Who here really believes," asked Danny Morrison, "we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?"

The public outrage that followed Morrison's declaration focused on the wrong clause. What was widely seen as a glorification of the gun was, instead, the beginning of a 20-year process that would see the Adams/McGuinness leadership -- slowly and with infinite patience -- unlock the grip of armed-force republicans from the lethal warmth of that Armalite and position it instead on the ballot box and the boundless possibility of democratic politics.

The Morrison speech was a device to coax the republican movement away from pure militarism and into electoral politics. It came in the wake of the hunger strikes and the electoral victories that accompanied them in the Republic and Britain. Support for the Morrison strategy led directly to Gerry Adams's election as MP for West Belfast two years later, in 1983.

But few saw the bigger play. The pro-republican sentiment evoked in the wider community by the hunger strikes quickly evaporated. Adams's election created a 32-county stir, but the interest lay in its novelty value, not for what it might conceivably herald for the direction of republicanism.

Everyone measures the distance subsequently travelled in different ways. In 1983 I spent election day with Adams and his wife, Colette, travelling around the polling stations of West Belfast in a black taxi. Nowadays such access would be viewed as a major coup; back then, nobody else could be bothered to do the same thing.

Some things haven't changed. The Adams then was the Adams now; sober, quietly-spoken, slow to engage in small talk, but mobbed everywhere he went by his supporters. I have a memory of him surrounded by small boys as he passed around the pipe he used to smoke for them to have a go.

Republican triumphalism was also there. In Belfast city hall, as it became clear that Adams was heading to victory, party supporters swarmed through the corridors and hallways. They roared and chanted as Adams was declared elected and the new MP raised his fist and declared "Tiocfaidh ar la". Then they carried him aloft back to the taxi and back up to Andersonstown for a victory rally.

Few enough in the south gave a damn. Historical trainspotters could see the barely perceptible shifting of the republican sands, but no one else even wanted to look Many years after Adams's election, while working in the Irish Press, I remember Sinn Fein press officer Rita O'Hare contacting me with a plaintive request for some coverage of the party in that year's local election campaign. Nowadays, O'Hare presides over Sinn Fein's Washington office and fends off more journalists than she allows in.

Ten years after Adams's 1983 victory came the first rocket through the public consciousness, the sudden realisation that the trainspotters were right, that something major was happening within republicanism. The rocket came in the shape of a newspaper report by journalist Eamonn McCann that Gerry Adams had been seen entering the Derry home of SDLP leader John Hume.

The message to most people, north and south, was reasonably clear: Sinn Fein was putting out democratic feelers and Hume was facilitating the feel. The British were slower on the uptake.

I suggested to Rosie Boycott, then editor of Esquire magazine in London, that a profile of Adams might be useful at this point. While Boycott was amenable, it took a lot of work to convince other editorial executives that something seismic was afoot. The piece was commissioned on the understanding that I could get limpet-like access to Adams.

What a difference a decade and a trip to Hume's house makes. In 1983 I had strolled up to Adams and asked him for a lift. This time it took two weeks of phone calls to a battery of minders to secure the access I sought.

In 1983 we travelled to Derry, where Adams was set to address a number of meetings of the `republican family'. This was a highly sensitive time for the Sinn Fein leadership -- the first part of the push to persuade them that the roadmap towards a Brit-free united Ireland had been redrawn.

This time they were going via the longer, more scenic route, via unionist consent and a Stormont assembly and cross-border bodies and Sinn Fein crown ministers and, in the most sensitive`vaut le detour' of all, an ending of the armed campaign.

Nothing was spelled out as crudely as that to Derry republicans. Adams was seed-setting -- slowly. With every tentative step forward there was a balancing reassurance. The visit to Derry, the beginning of republican re-education, incorporated a part-pilgrimage to armed-wing traditionalism. We stayed in a house replete with Long Kesh memorabilia. An Irish dancing costume on the back of a door part-hid a T shirt with 'Tiocfaidh ar la' on the front and a homage to ETA on the back.

In the city we met Martin McGuinness, not yet `out' as the public political force he would become; still better known as the alleged former chief of staff of the IRA, but so obviously bonded with Adams that it was clear that whatever Adams was at, McGuinness was at it with him.

One week later an IRA bomb went off in Frizzell's fish-shop on the Shankill Road in Belfast. Ten people were dead, scores injured. Adams helped to carry the coffin of the IRA man who had planted the bomb and killed himself. The world was outraged, quick to see the death of the fledgling peace process among the rubble of the Shankill Road, and failing to see that it could survive only if Adams was seen to heft the body of an IRA killer down a public street and to his grave.

Adams and McGuinness pressed on as a series of tit-for-tat atrocities threatened to murder hope as well. In December 1993 came the Downing Street declaration and another prolonged bout of republican agonising as the leadership battled for consensus and warded off a split. When the split did come, it was containable.

When those who broke away carried out the Omagh atrocity in 1998, Adams and McGuinness were sufficiently confident of their own support base to condemn it unequivocally.

From 1994 and the first ceasefire the battle was joined around decommissioning. For the last seven years the peace process has been a race by the republican leadership to implement enough of the promises of the Good Friday Agreement before an actual act of decommissioning -- and with it the effective ending of the war -- had to be done.

The leadership has been remarkably successful. In the absence of a single decommissioned bullet, it has overseen the creation of the Executive, Assembly and cross-border bodies, the fundamental reform of the RUC, and now, in the wake of decommissioning, the dismantling of an initial three security bases.

Whether -- as Adams mused in New York in February 2000 -- a united Ireland will be realised on the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Rising is a moot point. What is certain is that the road mapped out by the Good Friday Agreement puts no barriers in its way.

Was the outcome -- so far -- inevitable? Who can tell? When the outcome is positive, invariably there is a tendency to think so.

Back in 1993, as I sat with Gerry Adams in a house in Derry watching live coverage of the White House handshake between PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, peace in the Middle East seemed inevitable too. As we watched, Adams spoke of his hope that the White House `success' could be emulated in Northern Ireland.

Today Rabin is dead, killed by one of his own. Arafat struggles to control murderously angry Palestinians, his people subjected daily to ferocious military assaults by Israel. The peace that blossomed on the White House lawn lies dead. Nothing, after all, had been inevitable.