Yesterday there was good news for Northern Ireland. Loyalist weapons that had killed hundreds of people have now, like the IRA's arsenal, been put beyond use.

Why did loyalist weapons remain in play three years after the IRA disarmed? Why has the Ulster Defence Association not got rid of all its weapons yet? Is it bargaining for money or prisoner releases? Are there any weapons not covered by the decommissioning process? In the coming weeks important details must be teased out. A start will be made today when General John de Chastelain faces the press.

The big picture is that Northern Ireland — and the island as a whole — has taken another step along the road to normality. As President Mary McAleese, herself a Belfast woman, has put it, this marks “a very important step in building and consolidating peace in Northern Ireland, and signals a turning away from a culture of conflict towards a culture of good neighbourliness”.

Good neighbourliness is precisely what is still needed in Belfast, a city scarred by at least 20 peace lines dividing neighbour from neighbour, and in a province where most working-class people still live in segregated communities. President McAleese has personal experience of the division. As a young girl, she and her family were forced out of their North Belfast home as a result of intimidation by loyalists. Yesterday she and her husband, Martin, were thanked, along with unionist politicians, for the part they played in talking to loyalists and making decommissioning possible.

Another Belfast mother, Jeanette Ervine, was in tears at yesterday’s Ulster Volunteer Force press conference. Her husband, David, a former UVF bomb-maker who became a key peace-maker, died before he could see the organisation’s weapons destroyed once and for all. “The hard work of politics starts now,” Jeanette Ervine said. “Working-class areas are desolate. The people who once defended the community now need to work hard to bring it together and make it a good place for people to live.”

Exactly: after the decommissioning of weapons must come the decommissioning of the mind sets that fed the violence. The forcing of Roma families from their Belfast homes, last month’s sectarian murder of Kevin McDaid in Coleraine, and many other sectarian and violent incidents show that the poison of hatred has not yet been removed.

Now that the paramilitaries are at last leaving the stage, the challenge is all the greater for politicians at Stormont to move society beyond the politics of bigotry and sectarian head-count. As Mrs Ervine said, now is the time for the real work to begin.