The stalled Northern Ireland peace process has been given a renewed lease of life with the IRA’s move to end its armed campaign. But the long term survival of the initiative, set in train in 1994 by the IRA and loyalist paramilitary ceasefires, depends as much on the reaction of others as it does on follow up moves by the IRA itself.

The British and Irish governments, no less than Ian Paisley’s hardline Democratic Unionist party, will want time to test the IRA’s intentions.