The award-winning novelist and poet, Prof Seamus Deane, said yesterday that this weekend's events at Drumcree would show how much progress had been made in Northern Ireland.
Prof Deane, who yesterday received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Ulster in his native Derry, said:
"It seems to me we have been here before, and it is that delicate poise between the possibility of a peace, which certainly seems to be within grasp at one moment, and which, in the next moment, seems to have receded into yet another spiral of endless and increasingly anachronistic violence.
"Whether, in fact, people have the capacity to transpose their loyalties, or to find some way of melding and blending what they have refused to do up until now; whether they can do it or not, everybody knows this weekend will, not definitely tell, but will tell something about the degree of advance that has been made."