THE contending forces in the North changed places this week, with out as much as a moment's hesitation or glimmer of self consciousness.
Unionists claimed that a combination of London's weakness and Dublin's deviousness, both designed to appease Sinn Fein and the IRA, was undermining their identity.
Nationalists argued that Orange marches which had been imposed on them infringed their rights, insulted their identity and symbolised their second class citizenship in a state run, as of old, on Orange lines.
Both sides now claim the status of victims, a condition for which nationalists blame the unionists and the unionists blame everyone else, but especially their own isolation in the wider world.
When it's pointed out that the main tussles of the week have been over narrow ground a few hundred yards of road and events lasting no more than 15 or 20 minutes, questioners are greeted with bafflement.
There is no sense of irony at how closely the rhetoric and tactics of one have come to resemble the rhetoric and tactics of the other.
There are few acknowledgments on either side that the others might have a point. Or, more importantly, that a resolution might be possible in which, as Liam Cosgrave once hoped, there were no winners and no losers.
By last night most people seemed to believe that there had been winners and losers, and that the unionists had won.
It was a debatable judgment, more like a verdict on an afternoon's football than on the unfinished business of centuries. What was not in doubt was that politics had lost.
PAUL Arthur, one of the shrewdest Northern commentators, asked the rhetorical question during an interview on RTE Radio Where now is political authority in Northern Ireland?" And it's difficult to argue with his answer. There is none.
It was a week in which political authority and political reputations were at risk from the beginning. A week mined with contradictions.
The unionists were first into the field, prompting one distinguished British commentator, Andrew Marr, to write a column for the (London) Independent under the heading Ulster's blind underdogs".
In burning cars, blockading airports, stoning police and accusing the State of depriving them of their culture," he wrote, the unionist rebels are behaving and sounding increasingly like . . . well, like republicans."
That, of course, was while the riotous reaction to Sir Hugh Annesley's initial decision on Drumcree was still in full swing. The chief constable had decided that the Orangemen of Portadown should not return from their Sunday morning service by way of the Garvaghy Road.
But no sooner had that order been reversed and the RUC were to be seen manhandling nationalist protesters off the road so that the Orangemen could walk by in silence that the more familiar roles were resumed.
In the first half of the week Orange leaders had called on their colleagues across the North to converge on Drumcree, where those who had stayed put since Sunday still confronted the police.
The Order's supporters and allies heard the call and came out in force. Not only did they descend on Drumcree, they set off on a trail of arson, looting and intimidation elsewhere. Catholics were evicted, shops and factories attacked, roads closed and roadblocks set up.
The role of the police was usurped by gangs in loyalist areas and the resources of the RUC were stretched to a point at which, in the Chief Constable's judgment, it would have been all but impossible to resist a major assault at Drumcree.
Then, once the Orangemen had been allowed to march along the Garvaghy Road it was the turn of the nationalists to complain of betrayal and mob rule and in general to behave as the Orangemen had done 24 hours earlier.
No sooner had the march gone by than Brendan McKenna, a spokesman for the local residents, sent out a call for sympathetic action, urging nationalists to converge on the next contentious venue, the lower Ormeau Road in Belfast.
IN THE event, that proved impossible. The nationalists took to the streets anyway, in other parts of the city, in Derry and in half a dozen towns and villages.
They also took on the police as they had done at regular intervals until the Provisional IRA called a halt to its full scale campaign almost two years ago. A BBC journalist returning from a rally in West Belfast on Thursday night reported hearing shouts of Let's get back to war".
Indeed, the fear of a return to hostilities on the streets must have preoccupied many minds as young loyalists and nationalists in turn drew on plentiful supplies of petrol bombs.
Andrew Marr had written of the Orangemen's assaults on the police and the demands that John Major disown the Chief Constable If Sinn Fein propagandists had been able to write the plot, they couldn't have organised it better."
And Seamus Mallon, who was trapped in his home for several days, added a warning that loyalist and republican paramilitaries, who followed closely the week's events were waiting to pounce".
But among the features of the week has been the effort made by Gerry Adams and some of his colleagues on the republican side, David Ervine and Gary McMichael among the loyalists, to prevent paramilitary involvement in the spreading violence.
Paramilitary actions undoubtedly contributed to the anger of many in Northern Ireland. We should not forget the murders of the detective, Jerry. McCabe, and the taxi driver, Michael McGoldrick, the bomb set in Manchester and the rockets being made in Laois or fired at Osnabruck.
The responsibility for what happened to the people of the Garvaghy Road and the Ormeau Road, as well as the abandonment of the chief, constable, rests with David Trimble and Ian Paisley and their colleagues.
Mr Trimble went to the Garvaghy Road last year and, in a carelessly provocative gesture, celebrated as a triumph what had been a fair and decent compromise worked out with the residents.
He took his cue from the Rev Ian Paisley and achieved the leadership of the Unionist Party as a result. Now he has publicly and opportunistically opposed one decision taken by the chief constable and may have influenced another which risks undermining civil authority.
The Orange Order, in whose interest this was done, does not represent all Northern Protestants it never did but retains considerable populist power and influence. That strength has been used most notably but not always successfully to oppose or prevent progress.
It's a destructive political force, which will prove increasingly difficult to satisfy if the unionists are serious about reaching an accommodation with their neighbours.