Up early to go to Belfast for the historic first meeting of the new Northern Ireland executive. Peter Mandelson is on the radio, sounding historic. He asks us to reflect on the "enormity" of what has happened this week. I check it in the OED: "enormity - a monstrous wickedness, a crime or monstrous offence." Another word lost to the language.  Belfast is as I remember it - permanently wet. The taxi roars up to Stormont, past the triumphalist Carson statue - how long can that survive? - to the massive parliament building, an edifice of a size and grandeur which would be appropriate if its denizens governed the Hapsburg empire, but which in this small, outlying province looks merely ridiculous.  It was here 30 years ago that I heard Brian Faulkner, the last Unionist prime minister, offer places in government to nationalist politicians - a deal not unlike the one which has just been agreed. But that was in the earliest days of the troubles; they would get much worse, 3,000 dead worse, and Faulkner's offer was as pointless as sticking a traffic cone in front of a tank.  You can tell how historic an event is deemed to be by the number of satellite TV trucks parked outside. Today I can see 13 - good news for history fans since that implies the story could make the Associated Press top twenty of the year's historic news events, somewhere between the Indian elections and the fall of Jeffrey Archer.  Inside the building we wait for the new executive to turn up. William Hague came in the morning, but no one seems to have noticed. Finally a Sinn Fein party walked down the great staircase, past the statue of Lord Carnarvon, and addressed us, looking as they generally do, sour but historic.  Gerry Adams spoke in Irish, then in English, but it didn't make any difference,   since his words were lost, bouncing off the vast marble walls, the carved stone, the lavish brasswork, the painted ceiling and the massive chandeliers.  Lord Carnarvon would have considered this lot Fenian bogtrotters. The sight of them standing in the midst of that splendour - "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people" as it was called - might have made his statue crumble, but it was still upright when the party went back up, affording us the chance to notice that Gerry Adams climbs stairs rather like Groucho Marx, which is something you don't see on TV.  The executive met for the first time at 3pm. I followed up the stairs to hear the   Rev Ian Paisley, whose DUP is refusing to sit in the executive along with Sinn Fein, but whose ministers will take part in government and committees.  Paisley is an unchanging constant, and you could measure the progress of the troubles by the whitening of his hair. "I have been told this is a daybreak - but there is no daybreak for the children of Northern Ireland!"  He claimed - Paisley always has a scoop - that Bairbre de Brun, the Sinn Fein health minister, was demanding to know the religious affiliation of civil servants, so that she could sack the Protestants. Paisley's enduring appeal to his electorate is that he treats the Unionists as if they were   the oppressed minority. On and on he roared.  "You, the press, have told wicked lies! This is no new daybreak. It is a new night, and we do not know what midnight will bring!" I would have written more, but my Pentel which writes letters of fire had run out.  As he ploughed on, the DUP assemblymen around him looked first embarrassed and then bored. Their evident ennui near their leader may be a hopeful sign.  Messrs Trimble and Mallon emerged from the historic first meeting to report historically good progress. They were heckled. "What about those who were   murdered?" shouted someone, who could have come from either side. In the crush I found myself jammed up against Martin McGuinness, the former IRA chief of staff who is now education minister. He is a big man, and was wearing a well-cut suit, with neatly trimmed hair and highly polished shoes.  He looked like a minister, not a terrorist. Why was I just faintly reminded of the last chapter of Animal Farm?