Tony Blair is the right person for the role of Middle East envoy, his long-term Irish peace process partner Bertie Ahern said this morning, as he paid tribute to the outgoing prime minister’s qualities of persistence and determination.

And Mr Ahern is absolutely right. The prospect of forging a durable new dispensation for Israel/Palestine may seem to have receded further towards the horizon than ever before, but Mr Blair is bringing a highly individual set of skills to a problem which is fundamentally about negotiation.

His experience in Ulster will ensure that his instincts on the two core issues will be right. These are, in essence, that there is only one viable solution - the two states envisaged by the Oslo Accords - and a renewed realisation by all the protagonists that this is the case.

While it is a bad idea to assume that the success of a particular peace process model is transferable to another region, nevertheless, there are at least the outlines of old arguments which apply both to Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine.

Blair casts himself as EU president candidate

Speaking on French TV, Tony Blair sang the praises of the EU and sketched his agenda for its future, all in fluent French

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Both pit a community which regards itself as dispossessed victims against another which views itself as under siege.

When Mr Blair arrived in Ireland in 1997 crucial spadework had been completed by his predecessors - the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement of Lady Thatcher and the 1993 Downing Street Declaration of Sir John Major.

The Republican movement led by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness - both members of the Provisional IRA’s ruling ’Army Council’ - was ready to deal seriously so long as it received a genuine commitment to bring all the parties to the negotiating table. In the end, the Republicans settled for far less than the stated aim for which they had been fighting for three decades.

The Unionists were reluctant and divided over the wisdom of treating with "men of violence" but their then principal leader Lord Trimble was realistic about the need to corral the Republican foe into a binding accord which would necessarily mean painful choices in return for lasting constitutional rewards.

In the back of Unionists’ minds was the fear that if they did not seize the opportunity then events might relegate them to the sidelines as the British and Irish governments imposed their own version of Joint Authority for Northern Ireland.

Mr Blair’s great skill lay in finding and applying the right balance between these conflicting agenda, in turn using his alchemist’s gifts of cajoling, threatening and charming implacable enemies into seeing the merit of finally working together in a spirit of mutual respect, if not regard.

Like a satisfying Hollywood movie, Mr Blair managed to roll music and credits just last month with the previously unimaginable images of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness wreathed in smiles as, together, they descended the marble staircase of the Stormont Parliament.

It was Mr Blair’s version of the moment in 1993 when President Clinton shepherded Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin into photogenic peace.

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