HOWEVER much we may abhor the custom of sectarian parades, the fact is that for each community, but most especially for the unionists, these occasions represent assertions of threatened identity.
To Northern nationalists, with memories of unionist discrimination and repression, Orange parades appear triumphalist to many unionists, parades have become a source of possible reassurance against what they see as a threatened loss of identity. The sound of the drums may for many of them be analogous to the noises a nervous person may make in the dark in order to banish fear.
Meanwhile, unhappily the problem posed by Orange parades has been aggravated by the fact that in some areas Catholics have had to be relocated following pogroms or threats of pogroms. Moreover until the proportion of Catholic births began to decline in the mid 1980s, the nationalist population was growing quite rapidly.
As a result, there are a number of instances like those on the Garvaghy Road, and the Ormeau Road in Belfast where traditional Orange march routes now run through Catholic areas, giving rise to a potential for conflict. In such cases it may be genuinely difficult for the authorities to decide between allowing or banning an Orange march.
Requiring the RUC to take such decisions is an almost automatic recipe for trouble for, whatever they decide, the police will be regarded by one side or the other as having acted in a partisan manner. This leads almost automatically to attacks on the RUC by hooligan elements from whichever community feels betrayed by the particular decision.
A responsible government ought, therefore, to make provisions for some other method of deciding these issues. If a government is not prepared to take this responsibility, it is morally obliged to devise some alternative independent decision making mechanism.
Sir Patrick Mayhew's argument that this cannot be done because the government cannot delegate to an independent body a decision for which it carries responsibility is self evidently specious for it makes nonsense of the whole thesis that this decision is one taken independently by the police and is not the responsibility of the Government.
However, in the case of this year's Drumcree parade the issue at stake has become a quite different, and in a sense, more fundamental one. For whether the original decision to ban the return march along the Garvaghy Road was or was not the best decision became irrelevant once it had been challenged by a clear threat of violence. Thenceforth the issue was unambiguously the maintenance of the rule of law.
Of course a compromise between marchers and residents, freely arrived at, would have provided an alternative and preferable way out. But the persistent refusal of the Orange Order to meet a group of representatives of the Catholic housing estates, apparently on the grounds of the role played in this group by a Sinn Fein activist and former prisoner, blocked the negotiation of any such compromise this year.
IN that situation the issue unhappily became one of the capacity and willingness of the authorities to uphold the rule of law against an overt threat of violence. To the people of this State that issue has always been a fundamental one. That is why for the past 25 years, Irish governments, unlike governments in Britain, consistently refused to have any contacts with the IRA or its political front, Sinn Fein, unless and until the IRA showed it was willing to contemplate a cessation of violence.
The failure of British governments Labour in 1974 and Conservative in 1996 to maintain the rule of law in the face of violence and threats of violence from hard line unionism clearly puts at risk the stability and safety of Northern Ireland and all its people, both Protestant and Catholic.
A British government which in this way applies different standards to public order and safety in Northern Ireland from those it would apply in Britain itself, threatens the peace of that area in a more fundamental way than even the IRA have ever been able to do.
As for the prospects of a negotiated settlement between the two communities in Northern Ireland, this has suffered a grievous setback and not just because of the lessons that unionist politicians may be tempted to draw from these events.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the events, and one of the main obstacles to peace, was the obvious depth of paranoia amongst ordinary members of the unionist community.
It may well be that many ordinary unionists were as appalled as people here at the collapse of the moral and physical authority of the State in Northern Ireland last Thursday. But it has to be said that if this was the case, the evidence thus far suggests that such people have been intimidated into silence. For all the comments from unionists to the media suggest that the prevailing unionist reaction has been one of approval of what has happened.
Why so? Because however distasteful and disturbing the violence and threats of violence may have been, they feel that what happened at Drumcree was necessary in order to make a stand against an insidious threat of absorption in to a united Ireland against their will.
If we are to be honest, we should admit that for a long time there was just such a threat from this State more rhetorical than real, of course, but you cannot expect those who are under threat always to distinguish calmly between rhetoric and reality. The fact is that during and after the late 1940s, all the political parties in this State, with various degrees of conviction and hype and solidly backed by the vast bulk of public opinion, claimed that Northern Ireland had no right to exist and demanded that Britain hand it over to us regardless of the wishes of its inhabitants.
Moreover, when from the mid-1950s onwards a re-invigorated IRA was encouraged by this irresponsible political rhetoric to attack the North, its exploits were greeted with, at best, ambiguity and at worst enthusiastic support from public opinion here.
How could any normal unionist, however moderate his or her unionism, not feel threatened when in March 1957 he or she saw pictures of the streets of Dublin lined with crowds to greet the funerals of IRA men killed on the Border and of dozens of Catholic clergy at their grave sides? How well I can recall my own reactions of despair 40 years ago at the prospect of an indefinite future of violence and bigotry in Northern Ireland that those, events so unmistakably foreshadowed.
DURING the intervening decades, we in this State have learnt a bitter lesson. Gradually as the 1970s and 1980s wore on, we saw in Northern Ireland the fruits of our collective folly, and as a result attitudes here not merely changed, but were eventually reversed.
Where previously all our parties and 80 per cent of our people asserted our right to annex the North against the wishes of a majority there, today all our parties and 80 per cent of our people assert, with equal conviction but more wisdom, the opposite principle the necessity of consent by a Northern majority as a precondition of Irish political unity.
Have unionists in the North grasped this transformation in the stance of this State and its people? Do they realise that when our politicians, backed overwhelmingly by public opinion, now join with the British government in putting forward proposals like those in the Framework Document, they do so with a view to stabilising Northern Ireland in the interests of peace on this island and not with the devious purpose of taking the North over by stealth?
Clearly unionists do not understand or accept this reality. The after effects of past decades of Southern rhetoric have been so persistent that even today their residue is continuing to undermine our best efforts in conjunction with the British government to find a settlement a settlement that would enable both communities to live in peace and security together within the United Kingdom until and on less a majority of the people of the North decide otherwise.
This unionist incomprehension and its corollary, paranoia, are depressing realities tragically exposed by Drumcree.