`I think I'd rather the British government told us we had to have a united Ireland," said an anti-agreement unionist last week. "At least then we'd be negotiating with democrats in Dublin rather than being abandoned here to fight two sets of mafiosi."
There was precious little comfort for him or other frightened people following the Assembly elections. On the loyalist side, the failure of the Ulster Democratic Party to win any representation led its leader, Gary McMichael, to make on Saturday ominous sounds about a possible collapse of the ceasefire.
On Sunday David Ervine, whose Progressive Unionist Party had won two seats, faced serious trouble at a meeting with the Ulster Volunteer Force. Dissidents from both the UFF and the UVF declared themselves ready to get stuck in over Drumcree, as did some members of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, also presently on uneasy ceasefire.
"If the Drumcree parade is banned or rerouted," a senior Orangeman said to me on Sunday night, "what the Order does will probably be irrelevant. The worst elements in loyalism will run riot."
The republican scene was just as threatening. On Saturday night intransigent so-called residents, who coincidentally almost all seemed to be bellicose and fit young men, attacked police trying to take a legal Orange parade through a nationalist area.
Interviewed by David Frost on BBC on Sunday morning, Martin McGuinness was asked if the IRA would decommission, if the war was over and how onlookers would know if paramilitary organisations were being dismantled. He dealt with all the questions disdainfully, offered not an atom of reassurance and demanded massive and immediate change.
For the law-abiding, it is sickening to contemplate the elected bevy of convicted terrorists. Ervine and Billy Hutchinson at least seem to regret their crimes. Their republican counterparts, who make up half the 18 Sinn Fein candidates elected, do not.
When Gerry Adams was asked how he could reconcile his statement that Sinn Fein had never been involved in violence with the election of Gerry Kelly, one of the Old Bailey bombers, he replied: "What's wrong with that? Ken Maginnis is a former major in the Ulster Defence Regiment."
To the vast majority of decent people who served in the UDR to protect their country against terrorism, who lived in fear of their lives and who carried the coffins of colleagues murdered by the IRA, this was a breathtaking but calculated insult.
"They are so incredibly arrogant," said a Presbyterian minister from Antrim, who rang me on Monday. "They've only a few hundred supporters in our town, but the Sinn Fein posters are everywhere and they intimidated people at the polling station. `See you in the High Street, Joe', one of them said to my son. That's code for `We'll get you some night' and, because most of our people hate confrontation, they just stay away from anywhere they're going to be harassed by Shinners," he said.
In Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Armagh, ordinary Protestants are even more fearful. Most of them have no problem with those they describe as "decent Roman Catholics". They happily share power in local councils with the SDLP and aren't worried about cross-Border bodies, but they are worried about the rise of Sinn Fein.
In the Border areas and in parts of Derry, Protestants have endured almost three decades of violence aimed at ethnic cleansing. For three years they've watched republicans demonise their community internationally through black propaganda.
They've seen the attack on Orange culture escalate to a level where a dozen children, members of a junior Orange lodge, were attacked by rioters for daring to walk in the Protestant part of the Garvaghy Road, the residents of which are now routinely having bricks and petrol bombs thrown through their windows. They are equally terrified by the vicious loyalists who claim to champion their community.
`I would love this agreement to work," said one of the most prominent anti-agreement campaigners to me on Saturday, as he basked in the success of his party. "My head tells me it can't, my heart wishes it could, but all I can see is that the British government is turning a blind eye to punishment beatings and racketeering while the godfathers are feted as peace-makers."
He might have added to his list electoral fraud, identified as a huge problem by a recent Select Committee of the House of Commons: it is no coincidence that the Sinn Fein vote is always so underestimated in opinion polls.
What does a Border farmer think when he hears himself and his Orange colleagues described as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis by people he knows have ordered, committed or condoned mass murder, or when he hears that his Secretary of State's favourite Northern Ireland politician is David Ervine, a convicted bomber?
How is he expected to react when he sees a GAA cavalcade tearing through his village playing republican songs and flying Tricolours, yet he has been told his little church parade is liable to be rerouted at the behest of a bogus residents' group? And how is he supposed to feel relaxed about the Sinn Fein call for the removal of British security forces when republicans are still blowing the heart out of villages like Newtown hamilton?
What people like him see is a capitulation by democrats to terrorism. They believe that their identity and way of life are under threat from people who feel only contempt for them and who will not rest until they have knuckled under. He knows vaguely that Catholics under Stormont had grievances and that some of them were legitimate, but he believes that unionist leaders were at worst unimaginative and petty while the paramilitaries are fascist and corrupt.
Every Protestant west of the Bann believes that the Drumcree church parade has been re routed because the Sinn Fein-controlled Garvaghy Road Residents' Coalition, led by the fanatical and rebarbative Brendan McKenna, seems to want to drive unionists into violent confrontation with the state. Unfortunately, nerves are so raw and fears so deep that the knowledge is unlikely to stop many people from doing what Sinn Fein wants them to do. Drumcree could have been averted had Irish nationalism had the guts to stand up to republican fascism. The rerouteing decision is potentially disastrous for David Trimble. He has been ill rewarded by the British and Irish governments and by those nationalists who claim to admire his courage and vision.