AG百家乐在线官网

The politicians talked.聽 The journalists walked.聽 Up and down the same stretch of path outside Castle Buildings on the Stormont Estate.

We had been pacing for 32 consecutive hours but the sense of history was palpable. No one was prepared to leave, to risk missing the moment.

Some of us had covered the negotiations for two years. In the last two weeks, we had been joined by what seemed like half the world's media.

The midnight deadline and went, as did the snow, and there was only one small heater in the woefully inadequate press Portacabin.

The breaking dawn brought breaking news. President Bill Clinton had been on the phone to the party leaders in Northern Ireland.

By mid-afternoon, political editors huddling around the gate, including our own Adam Boulton, were hearing rumours of a deal.

With little warning, television pictures from inside were switched out and our producers in the gallery in London, Tim Needham and now-head-of-Sky News John Ryley, put them straight to air.

Flanked by the British and Irish Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, Senator George Mitchell said he was ready to go home and then uttered 19 unforgettable words.

"I am pleased to announce that the two government and the political leaders of Northern Ireland have reached agreement."

It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of those words on a journalist who had grown up in the so-called murder triangle.

The first eight years of my career had been a seemingly endless cycle of shootings, bombings and funerals.

Could it really be true? Had President Clinton's peace envoy pulled off a Good Friday miracle in Belfast?

He had certainly given me hope that our daughter Sarah, born just six weeks earlier, might grow up in a different Northern Ireland.

And that hope survived its share of setbacks, not least the horrific bombing of Omagh just four months later.

When David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party and John Hume's nationalist SDLP shared power, we thought we had seen it all.

No one imagined the IRA decommissioning its weapons and DUP leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, governing alongside his lifelong adversary, Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness.

But no one imagined Brexit either or the collapse of power-sharing at Stormont or the DUP holding the balance of power in Westminster.

Thanks to the perfect political storm, the Belfast Agreement is lauded more around the world than it is at home in Northern Ireland.

Sarah, 20, has grown up in a different Northern Ireland. She and her brothers, aged 18 and 13, have never witnessed a shooting or bombing.

And for that alone, I will be forever grateful for 19 words quietly spoken by a Senator from Maine, George Mitchell.