Both the Garvaghy Road residents and the Orange Order have choices to make. These choices are:
1) to give in to the other side or;
2) to offer to make a compromise that grants a substantial concession to the other side.
The option of sticking to their status quo positions does not really exist. If either side decided to do that, a solution to the Drumcree standoff is impossible. Each side knows that violence and killing are then inevitable consequences of their decision, in a moral sense.
A great part of the problem comes from the false notion, derived from the French Revolution, that people have inalienable rights, in the words of the Orange Order statement of June 11th.
People do not have inalienable rights when one person's rights conflict with someone else's rights. Indeed, it is in such situations that they have a moral and civil obligation to modify the exercise of their rights.
The Orange Order has no inalienable human right to march down any public road. Residents have no inalienable human right to bar any form of traffic from any public road. By definition, the language of inalienable rights has no place on the public highway. All sets of rights are relative rights, and can only exist in concord with other people's rights.
Equally, the Garvaghy residents and the Portadown Orange Order cannot wash their hands of things that happen elsewhere, as a foreseeable consequence of their local decisions. Both the Garvaghy residents and the Portadown Orange Order knew perfectly well that their rigid insistence on their own respective inalienable rights would lead to foreseeable conflicts elsewhere, such as in Ballymoney.
They could have foreseen, based on many precedents, that something like this would happen once they fanned the sectarian embers that each knew existed on the other side.
These conflicts were foreseeable, so both the Garvaghy residents and the Portadown Orange Order have a share of the responsibility for what has happened. The Order knew, when it set out to exercise its "inalienable right" to march, that something like that would happen arising from the confrontation that it and the Garvaghy residents would then create between them.
Orangemen claim that residents' objections to Orange parades are part of the republican strategy to remove the British presence from Northern Ireland.
First, Orangemen might ask themselves how much their own insistence on so-called inalienable rights to march contribute to this republican objective, by alienating opinion on the island of Britain.
Second, nationalists might reflect on how past IRA actions in assassinating retired or off-duty Protestant policemen and in carving up neighbourhoods through punishment beatings and mob law have contributed to these perceptions by Orangemen, and how the failure of nationalists to report such crimes to the police has underlined them.
There are no clean hands in this conflict. Northern Ireland is one of the most churchgoing places in Europe. It is time that Christian church leaders ceased talking in disembodied and structurally evasive language and told their followers of their specific moral obligation to make named concessions to the other community in their own particular locality.
It is time that Christ's message of turning the other cheek was preached by church leaders at their own community, rather than, as is more usual, in the direction of the other community.
Otherwise, we are not too far away from a Bosnian-style conflict.
John Bruton TD is leader of Fine Gael