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This was closing time at the Cobh bank, a routine handover of the office cash-box common to businesses the world over. But on this particular occasion, the familiar Securicor transport van had arrived amid a phalanx of Land Rovers from which those soldiers piled out. After the van picked up its cargo, the whole parade moved a half-block down the street and repeated its performance at Cobh's small post-office on the town's waterfront, before zooming out of town under police escort.

At the opposite corner of the island and across the border in Northern Ireland, TV crews from all over the globe were this day unloading their own heavy artillery, preparing to broadcast the momentous event initiated at midnight Thursday: Ulster's first power-sharing government, marking the presumed end of the 30-year conflict known as the Troubles. Seated side by side at Belfast's Stormont Castle Thursday were representatives of Sinn Fein, the electoral ally of the Irish Republican Army, and Protestant Unionists to whom Sinn Fein and the nationalist aspirations of Northern Ireland's Catholics have generally been anathema.

Cobh, in the Irish Republic, is as geographically remote from British-controlled Belfast as any city on the island. But the high-firepower escort for Cobh's cash boxes was a guarantor for those dramatic events in the North. Rumors were rife that a small faction of dissident Republicans hoped to wreck the talks with some daring act of violence on either side of the border. That cash box-protection-squad was called out to preempt any action which might cause tempers in Belfast to explode and inspire any player to walk away from the table.

In the annals of Irish diplomacy, guarding Cobh's cash box will be a minor footnote. Yet the fact that Ulster's new government took office Thursday was largely attributable to an accumulation of such unheralded gestures on both sides of the border.

It is part of what Inez McCormack in Belfast calls "the unheard part of the peace process." McCormack, president of Unison, the province's union of health care workers, was one of a handful of Irish and Irish-American labor, business and political leaders who helped broker the first cautious approaches between Northern Ireland's bitterly contending factions in 1993. At the time, any settlement of the Troubles seemed almost unimaginably remote: Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams was banned from British airwaves and denied a U.S. visa; the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest Protestant party, would not sit in the same room with Sinn Fein, let alone contemplate participation in a joint government.

Now, she watched the run-up to Thursday's government handover with what she describes as "a sense of disbelief -- and I don't mean that in a bad way." This salubrious astonishment even from so deeply engaged a political player is understandable. While those soldiers went on quiet alert in the Irish Republic in the South, open anxiety had mounted in Belfast last Saturday as Ulster Unionists debated for hours whether to take the final leap.

Unionist leader David Trimble finally won a narrow majority for the new government -- in which he holds the office of first minister alongside Deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon of the Catholic-nationalist Social Democratic and Labor Party -- by promising to resign if the IRA does not make disarmament progress by February. Trimble was praised in some quarters for his bravery -- putting his career on the line for the new government. Yet he also created a timetable and a demand far outside the agreement negotiated for months by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell.

"If that vote were not conditional, there probably would be euphoria," says McCormack. "But even so, the sense of a moment of transformation is still there. While the media has focused on that February deadline, it is just as important that there are no demonstrations in the streets saying shut down the new government. Things will never be the same again."

The struggles of Northern Ireland, a British province of just 1.5 million, may seem old news compared with, say, world trade talks and mass protest in Seattle. But in a curious way, the contradictions of the entire island of Ireland -- the roaring Celtic Tiger economy in the South adjoining a high-unemployment North economically dependent upon Britain; a Protestant-majority British province whose Catholic minority identifies itself with the Republic across the border -- are a microcosm of some of the most pressing issues of inequality and conflict in the global-economy era.

The story of Northern Ireland's peace deal, the so-called "Good Friday Accords" negotiated by Mitchell, has been portrayed in the United States as the dance of rival Protestant and Catholic leaders -- particularly, in recent months, the uneasy rapprochement between the UUP's Trimble and Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams. But that portrayal neglects what McCormack calls the "unheard" peace process, the education and organizing that convinced masses on both sides of the divide that peace was in their interest.

By the early '90s, politics in Northern Ireland was defined entirely by sectarian conflict, and government defined entirely as an obsession with security. Northern Ireland's contending parties were responsible to no one but their own back-benchers and paramilitary allies, breeding a kind of self-reinforcing militance.

Now, instead of bringing to power only each side's "permanent government," some truly resourceful people are seizing the opportunity represented by the Good Friday process to open Northern imaginations to the real meaning of inclusivity. Rather than cutting up the pie along lines demarcated Catholic/Protestant, Nationalist/Unionist, they're proposing that the door be flung open to all the constituencies whose voices have never been heard in the halls of Ulster government: the poor, the immigrant, the sexual minority, the physically handicapped.

So while the TV cameras head for Trimble and Adams, at the deepest level the peace process is not about them. Its complex procedures are engineered, says McCormack, to "create cooperation between government and the people who govern," which after 27 years of rule from London represents a radical departure.

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