IF there was ever a place in which the old Protestant claim that Catholics came out to watch the "Twelfth" was true, it was Newry. In the south Down town, with its traditional large nationalist majority, people have always had the confidence and security to be accommodating to the noisy, colourful Protestants-only parades of their Orange neighbours.
After Drumcree, all that has changed.
Yesterday started badly in Newry. Before 9 a.m., 300 nationalist demonstrators were blocking the Camlough Road on the southern side of the town, to prevent the isolated Altnaveigh Orange Lodge and its silver band from joining their co-religionists marching in from the north.
The RUC too was out in force. About 30 plastic bullets were fired before the Orangemen decided that discretion was the better part of valour and took an alternative route by the new fly-over across the Camlough Road.
At midday, as the main Orange parade moved off from the Belfast Road, the Catholic citizens watching from a distance behind police barricades in the town centre were in an angry mood.
A young couple with two small children, who said they did not vote Sinn Fein and normally kept their youngsters from watching "politics" on television, had come to protest at the takeover of their town by thousands of out-of-town Orangemen from Rathfriland, Banbridge and Dromara.
Drumcree was what had made them turn out.
"Those people have no right to be here. Because of them we, the people of Newry, are allowed to go nowhere in our own town," said the man. He warned that watching the events at Drumcree on television would create "a whole new generation of angry young nationalists".
Sinn Fein had organised a meeting behind the main RUC barricade in Hill Street. As the Orange drums reached a crescendo 30 yards away, a small boy asked his mother, "Are those the bad men, Mammy?"
On the other side of the barriers, Protestant children of the same age gambolled and played alongside the marchers.
Local Sinn Fein councillor, Mr Brendan Curran, said the Orangemen would be "trailing their coats" through nationalist Newry for the whole weekend.
Today, he said, they would be back again after the Royal Black Preceptory's `mock fight' at Scarva, insisting on taking their bus into the town bus station so that they could march back out along the Belfast road to the Protest ant housing estates - the same route they had just travelled by bus.
One young Catholic studying at an English university said he had never voted Sinn Fein before but that that would change after Drumcree.
A woman beside him broke in: "After yesterday, there'll be no problem with young people" she paused "Sinn Fein". It was clear she had meant to say the IRA.
Out on the Belfast Road there was another world. After the semi-deserted streets and nationalist jeers in the town, there was Union Jack bunting and bright banners; the Presbyterian Church Hall was serving Ulster fries and smiling people in their summer clothes were lining the footpath.
Two elderly women from the local non-subscribing Presbyterian Church had come out to see the bands. They loved the bands; they said they'd be out again in Warrenpoint next month at the Ancient Order of Hibernians parade to see the Catholic bands.
The Hibernians would gather in the hall beside their church and "better people you couldn't hope to meet". This was the old Newry of friendly, if occasionally uncomfortable, co-existence.
At the "Field", a mile northeast of the town, the Co Down Grand Master, Mr Gerald Douglas, said that if the Chief Constable had let the Drumcree parade go through last Sunday, the crisis would never have happened.
"The whole thing is a tragedy that doesn't reflect well on anybody. Surely, those people could have recognised another person's culture and not have abused it physically. We have a culture of our own. We don't force it on other people. We don't flaunt it.
"If people objected to that church parade, surely they could have turned their backs on it for 10 minutes. After all, Scripture tells us to `turn the other cheek'."
The slogan on the telegraph pole just outside the "field" put it more bluntly "For as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never never (in any way) consent to the rule of the Irish."