"Why can't Southerners realise that they're undermining us liberals all the time?" an Ulster unionist, whom I will call Roy, said to me last week. "They keep lumping the good and bad guys together and condemning us all in a way that just strengthens the neanderthals."
The fact that David Trimble is being smiled on down South does not impress Roy. "That won't last long. The minute he does anything that annoys nationalists, he'll be a baddie again. Just like Jeffrey Donaldson."
Like me, Roy has many friends who, like Donaldson, struggled with their consciences and ended up as unhappy Nos; he is as sympathetic towards them as towards those who ended up unhappy Yeses. He defines good guys as those who fight sectarianism and terrorism within their own community and try to reach accommodation with the decent people of the other tribe. He struggles to explain to nationalists that being anti-agreement doesn't make you necessarily anti-peace and even - more ambitiously - that being an Orangeman doesn't necessarily make you a bigot.
Like me, he knows many Orangemen whom he likes and admires. "If only they'd bother to come and meet them," he lamented, "instead of lazily swallowing Sinn Fein propaganda about triumphalist marches and carnivals of hate."
Some Southerners - including the Lord Mayor of Dublin and the Editor of this newspaper - bothered to go and meet them earlier this month at an Orange dinner commemorating 1798.
The inspiration behind it was Brian Kennaway, a Presbyterian minister who is evangelical about the importance of Orangeism as a defence of civil and religious liberty, but whose radicalism has earned him, among what he calls the "antediluvian" Spirit of Drumcree Orange faction, the nickname "Father Kennaway".
Kennaway has been fighting conventional nationalist and unionist perceptions of 1798 as well as anti-Orange bigotry. This dinner was therefore hugely symbolic. In the old Stormont parliament building, he and other like-minded colleagues welcomed as their guests academics, journalists and assorted movers and shakers from north, south and east. They wore dinner jackets rather than bowler hats and sashes, the music was provided by a string quintet rather than a flute band and the after-dinner lecture by Prof Brian Walker paid eloquent tribute to the idealism and self-sacrifice of many of those who fought on both sides.
What stunned those of the guests who had little or no experience of Orangemen was the sheer warmth and scale of the hospitality, as well as the revelation that it was possible to be civilised, intelligent, funny, open-minded and Orange.
I don't know how many of them realised that many of the admirable people they had been talking to had been among the protesters at Drumcree for two years running. Indeed, one of them, whom I will call Ian, had written to me in 1995, after the first stand-off: "I stood at Drumcree because I believed there was a vital point of principle at stake and that those who in some cases intimidated their fellow residents into helping them should not be rewarded by having the traditional parade rerouted."
When a man like Ian believes it necessary to dig in his heels over a walk of a few hundred yards, he should be listened to. Yet I have found few Southerners who have been prepared to listen to any explanation - let alone justification - of the Orange position on Drumcree.
But now, as Trimble basks in the agreement afterglow and people might be prepared to believe that at Drumcree he wasn't trying to trample on the necks of Catholics, let me try again.
The well-founded perception of every Orangeman is that after the 1994 ceasefire the republican leadership set up residents' groups to continue the war by other means. They believe the groups had no real democratic mandate. They suspect too it was deliberate that some spokesmen for these groups were convicted terrorists.
Since the Grand Lodge of the Orange Order bans contact with unrepentant terrorists, Sinn Fein simultaneously stymied dialogue while piously calling for it. Brighter Orangemen realised that the republican objective was - first, whipup anti-Orange sentiment through propaganda and agitation; second, to create the circumstances in which there would be violent clashes between marchers, protesters and police which would increase sectarian bitterness, radicalise the residents and outrage the world; and finally, to have the RUC and the British army in violent conflict with the Orange Order, the bastion of law and order in Northern Ireland.
The republican initiative has been a resounding success and shows no signs of letting-up. Knowing that Portadown Orangemen are solidly against the agreement and regard Trimble as a traitor, Gerry Adams cynically calls on him to mediate between them and the residents.
The two governments realise the sense of betrayal and paranoia is so great locally that there is no possibility Portadown Orangemen will agree to be rerouted, yet they see calls for protesters to come to Drumcree from all over Northern Ireland. They see disaster and bloodshed whether the parade is stopped or forced down the road.
They see only one way out - a civilised arrangement which allows local Orangemen only to walk down the Garvaghy Road, to play no music and do nothing provocative, while the residents stand on the pavements with placards protesting in dignified silence.
All those desperate to avoid another dreadful Drumcree on July 5th know that only John Hume can broker such a compromise. The Orangemen who accepted last week the rerouteing of the Tour of the North in the interests of community harmony have given him his opportunity. If he were to lead Irish nationalism in a call to the Garvaghy Road residents to be equally generous at this time of hope, he would be backed by the British, Irish and US governments as well as all those who want the agreement to work: it is hard to see how Adams could defy such a consensus.
The many decent Orangemen in many other contentious areas would respond - as they did last year - by rerouteing themselves on the Twelfth. The liberals would be strengthened at the expense of the neanderthals and the new politics would be seen to work.
Hume has the stature, the rhetoric and the support to achieve this historic breakthrough. Does he have the vision, courage and energy to take this next risk for peace?