BY FAR the most urgent task facing the Tanaiste when he meets Sir Patrick Mayhew today is to bring home to the Northern Secretary the yawning gulf in attitudes between Dublin and London that has been revealed by the events of last week.
That won't be easy, as anyone who watched Sir Patrick blithely urging Peter Snow to "Cheer up, for Heaven's sake" while the streets of Belfast burned, will readily agree.
But unless some attempt is made to restate, in unequivocal terms, an agreed joint strategy for dealing with the North, there will be very little point in the two men emerging to issue soothing platitudes about free and frank exchanges, both governments working closely together. And so on.
Last weekend, surveying the fallout from the first days of the marching season, an Irish politician who has devoted much time and effort to the pursuit of an equitable peace said to me: "For more than a decade we have been trying to persuade the nationalist minority in the North that the institutions of the six county state can be reformed, that it is possible for them to deliver equality and parity of esteem. After what has happened I don't think it will be possible any longer to make that case with conviction."
It is that joint approach by the two governments - legally enshrined in the Anglo Irish Agreement and reiterated in the Downing Street Declaration and the Framework Document - which lies in absolute ruins after last week. It was this explicit commitment, that the Catholic minority could, and would, be guaranteed a square deal within the Northern Ireland state, which laid the basis for the whole peace process and persuaded Gerry Adams and his close supporters in Sinn Fein to work for a cessation of violence.
Reasserting its primacy, and the fact that both governments are equally committed to this objective, is far more important than questions as to whether David Trimble was right to talk to a former loyalist prisoner at Portadown, or what degree of pressure was brought to bear on Sir Hugh Annesley to change his mind, or even why the Irish Government was not informed of his decision.
One of the more surreal experiences for this reporter in Belfast last week was to hear people in nationalist areas remark grimly: "It wouldn't have happened under Mrs Thatcher. She was the only one who ever stood up to them."
The Iron Lady may not have had much use for fine phrases about parity of esteem, but she had a gut instinct for parity of contempt.
Miners, hunger strikers, Argentinians, loyalists all were troublemakers who, in her view, challenged the rule of law and deserved the same treatment. The scale of unionist anger after the signing of the Hillsborough agreement presented a far more serious danger to public order than we saw last week. Members of the RUC were threatened, and some of them were forced to leave their homes. But this was British government policy, not to be overturned by threats of Orange rebellion.
There are other similarities with those days. In 1981 Mrs Thatcher remarked that Northern Ireland was "as British as Finchley". A number of factors contributed to her change of mind, not least the IRA bomb at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton.
I remember there were reports at the time that she had set herself with grim determination to learn about Ireland, even taking Robert Kee's The Green Flag with her on holiday. Whatever the reasons, she signed and stood over the Anglo Irish Agreement which, in its preamble, recognises and respects the identities of the two communities in Northern Ireland and the right of each to pursue its aspirations by peaceful and constitutional means".
NOW we are back to a British prime minister telling the Daily Telegraph that Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom "just like Surrey" and that, by implication, the same considerations of public order should govern the decisions of the police.
This, more than any other comment by a British politician, reveals how far the two governments have grown apart. It also provides depressing evidence of how much John Major has forgotten, or chooses to ignore, the spirit and the carefully drafted texts of the Downing Street Declaration and the Framework Documents.
It is just possible, though not very likely, that Sir Hugh Annesley did change his mind about the Orange marchers in Drumcree for operational reasons, because he feared the consequences of widespread loyalist violence across the North if they were not allowed to go through Garvaghy Road.
As one Belfast commentator remarked to me wearily: "He is a Dublin Protestant, after all. What would he understand about how people feel up here?" But other people in the RUC, the Northern Ireland Office must have understood very well and known that there was an onus on them, laid down in the Anglo Irish Agreement, to consult the Irish Government about such a decision.
It defies credibility, for example, to suggest that experienced officials in the NIO would not have anticipated the kind of emotional response that would be triggered in the nationalist community, North and South, by the methods that would be needed to push the marchers through Drumcree and the Lower Ormeau Road.
Catholics penned into small terraced houses by RUC Land Rovers jammed up against their doors, protesters beaten off the streets by police wielding batons, families forced to flee their homes - it was scenes like these which led to the resurgence of the IRA in 1969 and which has sustained support for it, through the most brutal of its "mistakes", for over a quarter of a century.
OF all the issues on which it was absolutely essential for the RUC, as the instrument of the state, to be seen to be scrupulously impartial between the two communities the Orange marches was the most important.
Even if Sir Hugh Annesley did not appreciate this, many of his officers did. It is several months now since the Deputy Chief Constable, Ronnie Flanagan, all but pleaded that an independent review body should be set up to advise, and preferably decide, on the relatively few controversial marches which poison the political and social climate every summer.
The idea received the backing of the Irish Government and of the British Labour Party spokeswoman, Mo Mowlam. Yet, in spite of the fact that community leaders on both sides had issued dire warnings about the dangers of the marching season, the proposal was rejected by Sir Patrick Mayhew.
Why? If Dick Spring does not get an adequate answer to that question today we may have to conclude, as many Northern nationalists have done, that London had already decided to abandon the strategy laid down in the Framework Document, described as "a shared understanding" between the British and Irish governments, and that therein lies the real significance of what happened at Drumcree