MORE than 20 years after the remembered act of violence, Gerry Fitt's grief and sense of moral outrage still have a terrible urgency. "It was the worst thing I have ever seen. His hands were cut, fingers hanging off. He was nearly decapitated. He was murdered just after he left me and you never forget that." The former SDLP leader was describing, as though it happened yesterday, the summer night in 1973 when he was telephoned the RUC and asked to identify the body of friend and political colleague, Paddy Wilson.
On Monday, John White, who served 14 of a life sentence for the murder, was received Downing Street by the Prime Minister, Mr John Major, as a member of a deputation the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party. He reporters that he was there to ensure that incidents like the death of Paddy Wilson would never happen again and added, "like many ex prisoners I have committed myself to the peace process".
Gary McMichael, who was also on the delegation, saw the meeting at Downing Street as a "reward" for the Loyalist parties who, despite the pressures on them in recent weeks and months, have committed themselves to the democratic process. He believes, and British politicians like Dr Mo Mowlam agree, that Monday's meeting was designed to send a clear message to Sinn Fein that its representatives will also be "rewarded" if the IRA reinstates its ceasefire.
Sinn Fein, perhaps not surprisingly, takes a rather different view of the meeting, pointing out that Mr Major steadfastly refused to see Gerry Adams for the 18 months of the ceasefire. Perhaps if the British prime minister had decided to "reward" the Sinn Fein leader, or even recognised that Mr Adams also needed to demonstrate that commitment to the political process could deliver results, we should not be facing the current dangerous crisis in the North.
Most people who want to see reconciliation take firm roots in Ireland will probably agree with Paddy Devlins more forgiving comment on last week's meeting between former Loyalist prisoners and John Major. "You have to speak to everybody if it means peace." He, too remembers Paddy Wilson as a supporter of Civil Rights, wanting to break away from the sectarian politics.
And yet, Gerry Fitt's anger and his belief that to forgive and forget the past is, in some sense, a betrayal of those who have suffered and died, have a special relevance to the situation in which we now find ourselves. We have all been shocked not only by the political mistakes which led to Drumcree, but by the savagery of the reaction to it. How swiftly we have been stripped of the comfortable illusion that there has been a slow and steady improvement in relationships between the two communities in Northern Ireland.
Since the IRA called its ceasefire, and even since it broke down, much has been written and said about the growth in mutual understanding and tolerance. The blame for lack of political progress towards a reasonable settlement has been placed squarely on party leaders - who are said to be "out of touch" with the moderate feelings of the mass of people in both communities who want to live in harmony with their neighbours.
IT IS true that sterling work has been done by community leaders, church groups and teachers operating programmes with names like "education for mutual understanding" to build bridges across the divide and, even, to encourage a greater appreciation of diversity. Then something comes along like Drumcree and we are brought starkly up against the possibility that nothing has changed, that the instinctive mistrust and sectarian hatred between the two communities is as great as it ever was. How otherwise can we account for the attacks on Protestant churches, or for Catholics being driven out of their homes? Surely, if the efforts made to build understanding and trust - along with greater security afforded by the relative absence of violence - amounted to anything, it should have been possible to respond to the pleas for tolerance and patience, and for the centre ground to hold?
What has been left out of this reckoning, it seems to me, is the legacy of bitterness and grief from a quarter of century of violence, which has been too easily forgotten by too many of us. In the immediate aftermath of the IRA's ceasefire declaration I, like other observers, was made poignantly aware that for many who had lost beloved relatives in the conflict, the peace was a bitter time.
It seemed as though their loss which, while the violence continued was accorded some recognition and dignity, was now brushed aside almost as an embarrassment. One woman, whose husband had been shot by paramilitaries, told me that she cried all night when the ceasefire was announced, watching the celebrations on television and feeling wholly excluded from the joy. All she could think of was her dead husband, and that the men who had orphaned her children were now being feted as peacemakers.
For a while afterwards, there was some discussion that official acknowledgment should be made of the loss suffered by thousands of people in the North, if only to lay to rest a little of the bitterness felt in both communities. One suggestion was for a public memorial, rather like the Vietnam monument in Washington, on which the names of all those who had died in the conflict would be inscribed in chronological order, regardless of which community they came from or the degree of alleged involvement in the violence. It didn't come to anything, perhaps because the challenge of accepting all who died - paramilitary killer, RUC man, innocent civilian - as equally worthy of remembrance was too difficult. But some people have continued to press the case. Michael Longley, in particular, has written of this need for collective recognition of the loss and suffering of all the victims, as the only basis on which it is possible to build a better future. His beautiful poem, Ceasefire, is a powerful appeal for a public act of acknowledgment necessary to lay the past to rest.
YET, somewhere along the way, it is as though the grief of those who still mourn became an embarrassment, an uncomfortable obstacle on the road to peace.
Those who persisted in demanding recognition of wrongs that had been done to them were reproached for their refusal to forget the past and put it behind them. Instead, we mingled with the crowds who came out to celebrate peace to the strains of Van Morrison singing Days like This, and reassured each other that there could be no return to the past.
We have emerged sadder and wiser from the events of recent weeks. What happened at Drumcree and after was not all due to a lack of leadership from the politicians and the police. There are many people in both communities in Northern Ireland who feel a degree of anger that has been hardly touched by the peace process.
Gerry Fitt has reminded us of this, and of how urgent a task it is for us to recognise that pain.