NO wheel is perfectly made; even the rims of a Ferrari or a Mercedes contain minor imperfections, little imbalances of weight which count for nothing in the short or even medium term. The car swishes smoothly along, and not a murmur is heard from the wheels.
But in time, the tiny errors in construction will cause the disequilibrium of weight to distort the wheel - microscopically, at first, but the initial error, aided by the centrifugal force of its normal movement, inclines the wheel to be biased towards wherever it is slightly heavier.
That bias will become more pronounced as it recruits material from the rest of the wheel and as it does so, the distortion intensifies until soon the wheel is no longer round but partially elliptical, and every time the driver goes at speed he can hear a fierce drumming sound from his wheels. They are imbalanced and a fierce drumming sound is what we can hear from Harryville these days as Northern society shows us once again that it is a centrifugal construct, whose imperfections will always draw the rest of society towards them.
Beyond understanding
The important thing to understand about Northern Irish society is that it is not understandable. If you are part of it, you are part of the spiralling wheel and are incapable of seeing the whole picture, and all you genuinely know about is your part of the wheel, and the effects of centrifugal force on it and you, if you are outside it, you have no way of understanding what it must mean to be part of that wheel.
Look at the faces of those people marching at Harryville. Are they not humans like the rest of us? Do they not love and, have sex and eat and drink and breathe and raise their children like the people of Limerick or Waterford? Do they not weep in grief and cheer with delight and laugh with happiness? Is their tissue not identical to ours? Would a Martian scientist not analyse their brains and find them, to the last molecule, exactly the same as the brains of the rest of the people of this island?
Yet there is nothing about them which I find comprehensible in their conduct and their rages, they seem as distant from. me as are mandril monkeys. My heart does not understand what fires burn in their hearts and cause them to do such foul and abominable things. Their angers are beyond my emotional radius. Nothing about their conduct finds an echo within me. They are a mystery.
If that is all they are, a mystery, so what? But they are not.
They are a vital part of that wretched wheel called Ulster, which is riven by rages and animosities as complex and as arcane as anything that metallurgy can devise. Wise men watch the agonies and the incessant distortions of that wheel, and turning, walk away, whistling a soft anthem of pleasure that wheel is not their wheel to have to steer. We however behave differently: we claim that wheel to be our wheel. We want to add it to our car.
Paeans to homicide
Does any intelligent person in Ireland really seriously believe that the appalling people who gather at Harryville to picket Catholic worshippers, shouting abuse at the blameless, the innocent, and bawling their exultant paeans to homicide are the way they are because of the British presence, and that if the British were to withdraw, that oddest of species, homo harryvillensis, would subside into docile acquiescence? Does anyone who talks so blithely about mutual respect for one another's traditions within Northern Ireland seriously maintain that events in Dunloy, in Harryville, and predictably this summer, in Garvaghy and the Lower Ormeau Road contain any evidence whatsoever that the day will ever come when "mutual respect" is even a remote possibility?
It is not the centripetal force of reconciliation, respect, accommodation which changes the shape of the turning wheel; the turning wheel is effected by forces outward, not inward. And always since the North troubles began the imperfections within Northern society have had the greatest influence on what the shape of the wheel is going to be, no matter how, tiny those imperfections are. They have a magnetic effect on the more benign political material around them, which cannot resist gravitating towards them.
In this world, the minority extremist always pulls his part of the wheel towards him. The SDLP agenda is in part set by Sinn Fein; the Ulster Unionists are endlessly drawn towards positions set by extreme loyalists. Was it surprising that during last Sunday's disgusting displays of bully-boy swaggering not a unionist politician was to, be seen standing up in defence of the right of Catholics to go to, church without hindrance or insult?
And was it surprising that the agenda for the now annual Garvaghy Road conflict is not set by those who want accommodation, almost certainly a majority on both sides, but by the extremes, who want the wheel to go elliptical, and who relish the drums of discordance?
Smiting the unchosen
We can call the fine folk outside Harryville Church bigots, which is what indeed they are; but does that add to the sum of human knowledge? Does that enable us to know them any better? It does not, for they are unknowable: they revel in insults and abuse which appal us, yet their feelings are real, and full of righteousness.
That is the distance between us - what we see as wicked and immoral they regard as being a public expression of Protestant godliness.
Loyalism of this kind is a perverse Ulster Zionism in which God's elect do God's will with an Old Testament absolutism, which generally involves smiting those not of God's elect. Not merely do we know that no deal can be done with such people, but we also know that the faster goes the wheel towards general accommodation in the North, the greater the distortion they can cause within that wheel.
This means one thing. No solution is possible. No settlement awaits us. No formula can create harmony. We have been pursuing the fanciful mirage of a negotiated end to this conflict; and whenever we go faster towards that conclusion, we invariably hear a familiar drumming sound. Go fast enough, and your car will crash, for certain sure.