But the problems still looked like high mountains, rather than the low "hills" Clinton had called them in his Tuesday speech in the southern Irish town of Dundalk.
Clinton spent much of Wednesday at the imposing Stormont parliament complex in the hills overlooking Belfast Lough morning in five hours of intense negotiations.
He held separate private meetings with Protestant and Catholic political leaders from the Ulster Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Clinton insisted on two elements that were anathema to both sides.
Speaking in Belfast's sparkling new Odyssey arena, Clinton insisted on sweeping reform of the 92 percent Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Northern Irish police, which nationalist republicans insist upon. This has been refused by Protestant unionist leaders.
But Clinton also said progress could not be gained until the Irish Republican Army started to hand over, or decommission, its huge arms supplies, as Protestant unionists demand.
Northern Irish political sources said Clinton spent the morning at Stormont working hard to try and broker a new, complex political deal. They said the deal would involve several stages, with concessions required from the British government.
"It was hard, tough, real politics from 8 a.m. this morning. ... It is something that will stand us in good stead," Seamus Mallon, deputy leader of the SDLP, told British Broadcasting Corp.
Ulster Unionists are not prepared to tolerate Trimble permitting such meetings as long as the IRA refuses to start the arms decommissioning.
Before driving to Stormont, Clinton held unscheduled and serious talks at the Hilton for an hour with Catholic nationalist leaders John Hume of the Social and Democratic Labour Party and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.
Clinton's priority was to use his leverage with Adams, built up over the past six years of the arduous Irish peace "process," to prevail upon the IRA to move ahead with destroying or handing over to neutral control some of their massive weapons reserves.
Although the IRA has observed a truce for the past three years in its decades-long guerrilla war to force the majority Protestants of Ulster into a United Ireland, it has refused to hand over, or decommission, a single one of its guns or slabs of Semtex explosive. Northern Irish security sources estimate the IRA weapons reserves as sufficient to equip two light infantry divisions.
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