THE extraordinary thing about the republican response to the Good Friday Agreement is not that they are taking so long to make up their minds, but that they are thinking about it at all.

Those of us who were highly sceptical that there could ever be an accord that stretched from unionism and loyalism to encompass the republican movement, find ourselves almost overawed by the willingness of republicans to consider what they have never considered before.

The Agreement itself is, I believe, roughly at the centre of gravity of Northern Ireland politics. It secures the Union, on the understanding that unionists must share power and develop relations with the Republic.

It opens a cross-border political arrangement for nationalists, on the understanding that they will recognise their responsibilities to govern the North.

You don't have to be a political scientist to see how this clashes head on with republican ideology, but you do have to be blinkered to suppose that republicans are as hamstrung by that ideology as before, when they are seriously thinking about saying Yes to this.

The Agreement accepts the consent principle, an Assembly and changes to the Irish constitution, things which Sinn Fein and the IRA have repeatedly said they could not accept at all.

They must see that there is no role for bombs now. Some of them had thought that the big bombs of the early '90s had brought the British to the table to make concessions. They had thought that the only thing that held up those concessions was John Major's need for unionist votes.

They were wrong.

There are strong republican voices now still airing their doubts about the Agreement. Councillor Mary Nelis from Derry has written that the Agreement came about in its present form because the British "backed down again in the face of militant unionism, and retreated behind the consent principle".

That doesn't sound like the language of someone who is going to send the kids out to vote Yes.

Bernadette McAliskey has been speaking against the deal in the USA, and getting a poisonous drubbing for her trouble from Niall O'Dowd. In his Irish Voice editorial, O'Dowd skirts the arguments for and against the deal, and says Bernadette "a sad voice from the past" should show more gratitude to Adams and McGuinness for what they did for her daughter, Roisin.

The republican case for the Agreement is that it has the potential to bring about a united Ireland in time. The engine which, they think, will drive this change is demography. An older Protestant population will die off, and then there will be more Catholics.

How these are all to be trusted to vote for Irish unity isn't clear, though especially if they have, by then, experienced a generation of functioning northern devolution.

Mary Nelis, who reads the consent principle as "crude sectarian headcounting", would have to accuse republicans of the same thing, if they were relying on demography to get them home.

Besides, the demographic engine only gets you to a united Ireland if the experiment in devolution and power-sharing fails.

If nationalists, in 20 years from now, have been thoroughly disillusioned with devolution and power sharing, then more of them will vote Yes for a united Ireland.

If devolution and cross-border co-operation work well, then most nationalists will be content to retain it. The tendency in either direction will not take long to become clear.

If that tendency is towards failure, then the consent principle and the prospects of a plebiscite and the demographic shift will exacerbate unionist insecurity. If it is towards successful partnership and stable government, then the republican dream will die.

Republicans might try to undermine the Assembly, but few will vote them into it to do that.

Republicans will focus more clearly on their real prospects if they discard their fantasies about a Catholic majority one day delivering a united Ireland.

They are clearly grappling now with the real challenge in front of them. They can work to destabilise the Assembly and see their vote fall, or they can take a share of power.

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