In that sense, the Presbyterian debates do not feel like friendly arguments over the breakfast table, or even the more
heated kinds of exchanges that might take place in the presence of a marriage counselor.
As these filmmakers speculate, Paisley and McGuinness didn't so much convince each other
of the rightness
of their respective views as they settled on a
kind of ideological détente, coming to respect each other's tenacity and intelligence through their
heated dialectical
exchanges.