A woman said to me: "The drums frightened my little girl the first time she heard music at her new school. She tried to run away. The only drums she ever heard before were Orange drums, when marches passed down this street." The drums may yet bring down all last week's achievements.
Clinton and Blair and Ahern would be irrelevant. Parades may be the bit of the body politic that constitutional reforms cannot reach.
The woman lives near the electrical goods shop. I was attracted into the shop by a blue fridge. I wanted to see whether it was much dearer than ordinary fridges. I was surprised to be doing this on the Lower Ormeau Road.
I'd gone there to see for myself the stretch of the road which has become famous for Protestant marches - such as the one by the Apprentice Boys which was due to take place today - and bitter opposition to the marches by local Catholics. What was surprising to me was that the Lower Ormeau is a city street, with a scattering of shops and services.
It is true that the great majority of people in the North will live well enough under practically any institutional arrangement. But government isn't everything. How people feel about each other and treat each other - that's what makes or breaks lives.
Can you call a place normal where 30 or 40 elderly men cannot march, unarmed, down a street - taking maybe 10 minutes to do so - without grievously offending their fellow citizens?
The marching season begins today, even if the Ormeau march has been banned. Everyone dreads the big marches. "It's like 25 years ago in our part of Belfast," a woman said to me, "coming up to Drumcree. The streets are deserted. Anyone who can possibly get out, gets out."
Drumcree is only a march. Are things in Northern Ireland normal, if a march can empty it out?
The Lower Ormeau looks blighted. But the streets are full of grand little houses, in a wonderful location - almost in the centre of town, but with the Lagan curving behind them. Only a few hundred yards away, houses off the Ormeau have doubled in price in the last few years as young professionals move in.
But on the stretch where the march is disputed, assertion and counter-assertion of identity is are keeping the place in a time-lock.
On the biggest wall a mural shows residents being trampled as Mo Mowlam, depicted as Pontius Pilate, washes her hands. A bit further on "Tiocfaidh ar La" is scrawled on a wall besides "South Derry Taigs".
Beneath those words, an earlier mural can just be made out of King Billy on his horse at the Boyne. These were once Protestant streets. That, after all, is the marchers' justification. When they first marched this route they were among their own.
But the Troubles have changed all that. The name of Martin Hurson, who died on hungerstrike, is commemorated on one wall. Above all, on the Sean Graham betting-shop, a plaque honours the five men murdered there in a sectarian massacre.
There are their names. Their ages. They were middle-aged men, and boys. And the sentiment central to the parades issue is carved on that plaque. The men were, it says, "murdered for their faith".
So they were. They weren't murdered for anything they did. They were murdered for what they were. When next a Protestant march passed that betting-shop, some marchers held up five fingers, in triumph. To me, that should have been quite enough for the Loyal orders themselves, voluntarily, to have relinquished all marches along this road.
How badly, after all, can you treat your fellow citizens? But far from it. A new Orange Order edict that no Orangeman can have any contact with the Parades Commission - the body set up by law to decide on contentious parades - has been promulgated.
The commission, though it has banned today's march, speaks of preparing the ground "for one or more parades to take place" along the Lower Ormeau Road in 1998.
A catholic woman who has never been near a parade or a protest - she would be more at home in a villa in Tuscany - said to me: "They hate Catholics. That's the one thing you must understand about this place. They hate us."
This deep and widespread perception remains, after all the squaring of institutional circles that took place last week. This is something that not all the patience and skills of the likes of John Hume and those who trot after him can conjure away.
Every Northern Catholic I have met in the past three months, with only a handful of exceptions, feels hated, or disliked, or mistrusted, or excluded from opportunity, or privately not respected, by the Protestants around them. It is one of the many naiveties of the Republic's attitude, that Southern people think all Catholics need is equality in jobs and housing. That's not it at all.
A unionist who was at Drumcree two years ago, and knows many of the main players in that complex and impassioned scene, said to me: "There were quiet old men there, ready and willing to die. They would have offered themselves for death, if they hadn't been let through. What use would it be now, if loyalists had been handed a Bloody Sunday of their own?"
I was in London at the time, and Drumcree is nothing to me. But I burned with rage. I saw the state assisting one community to oppress the other. What you think about Drumcree is a benchmark.
Reasonable, detached Catholics say: "They should reroute that march." Reasonable, detached Protestants say: "It's only a march. It only lasts a few minutes once a year. The protesters should let it through."
A few weeks ago UTV's Insight did a programme where teenagers questioned first the leader of the Portadown protesters, second a spokesman for the Orange Order and third, Alistair Graham, the chairman of the Parades Commission. Never mind the yawning gulf between the first two.
It was the young people themselves who made one despair. The way they framed their questions told you what they already believed.
I wonder whether the tiny percentage of children who attend integrated schools think and feel differently about parades than the adults around them? I wonder where the middle ground on the Lower Ormeau and the Garvaghy Road is to be found? I can't find it within myself. Can tolerance and accommodation exist in society, if it doesn't exist within individual people?