When I meet someone from Waterford or Tipperary or Donegal I haven't met before, I don't immediately say to them: "What do you think about rehousing travellers?" I don't say "Pleased to meet you" to them, shaking hands, and then say: "Do you think there should be another referendum on abortion?"
But one of the things that has happened about Northern people is that Southern people judge them on just a few such extreme indicators, which are extracted from all the complexity of their lives.
For example, I was at an open-air Methodist service - a "field meeting" - in the car-park of a small church at a place called Derryanville, near Portadown, last Sunday. I didn't know until I got there that across the rolling fields, on the skyline, you can see the Protestant church at Drumcree, which is the physical focus of the biggest and most hostile display of conflicting identities in Northern Ireland. From our point of view, singing our hymns, listening to our sermon, flurrying to get our umbrellas up when brisk showers swept across the soft landscape, Drumcree was peripheral.
But the priorities of news journalism dictate that the only interesting thing about Derryanville is where it is in relation to Drumcree, and the only interesting thing about its congregation is where they stand on the Drumcree issue.
But even if the country people I was amongst do choose to line up with the Orangemen, I didn't ask them about it. The journalism of the Troubles is on its way out. The new Ireland will need a new kind of journalism.
That new kind will surely be about people. But how do you get behind the many facades of Northerners? How do you get some understanding of the place, and some sympathy for it? Ordinarily, journalism is one of ways we get to learn about other places and people.
But journalists themselves have to learn, first. And in Northern Ireland they can't employ the rough manners of war correspondents any more. They can't patronise the place by presenting it as abnormal. They can't offer themselves as channels for the complaints of near-professional victims. They're going to have to be more patient than that, particularly because it seems a feature of Northern life that when a stranger is present, the personal is hidden.
The Friday night - the night of the vote in the referendums - was a case in point. I was wandering around Belfast from the afternoon on, not able to settle. I walked over to West Belfast and had a drink in a crowded pub with an acquaintance.
Last time I was in there it was a Saturday morning and the three huge televisions on the walls were blaring away, and a lot of men were already sitting solemnly at little tables, in front of pints of lager glowing like gold in the shafts of dusty sunlight, wearing Celtic gear. They expected to lose: on the whole, Celtic does lose. But they were going to proclaim their loyalty to the end, even where no one could see them.
Sporting allegiances are easily acknowledged. But as for politics, these very lived-in men reveal nothing about those. They told jokes, that Friday night. They were brilliantly irreverent about every aspect of public life, Sinn Fein pieties included. I happened to know that some of them, at least, had been in prison. Some were important community figures. Some would have been influential in delivering the Northern nationalist Yes vote. But the pub is for laughing in. You don't just come upon these veterans in mid-deliberation. Genial as they are, they are past masters at giving nothing away.
Later that night I was in a club, a middle-class club, back in south Belfast. I kept phoning The Irish Times newsdesk to find out what RTE's exit poll results were. Coming up to midnight, I heard the marvellous news. Two other people in the room showed excitement at the South's 95 per cent and the North's 70-75 per cent. That left maybe 15 or 16 people - in a sheltered environment - who showed nothing. I can't imagine anywhere at all in the South so seemingly indifferent.
I asked whether I might attend the Methodist field meeting because of the sense of huge cultural difference. Being on someone else's patch and seeing how things are done there might be a beginning.
There was nothing picturesque about the little church in its gravel yard. You pass so many such plain buildings in Northern Ireland that you don't even notice them. But once, an elderly gentleman who made me welcome told me, it was a chapel in an orchard, on a promontory surrounded by bog.
And Wesley spoke there to the very modest people who were the first Methodists in the North. I don't know enough about Protestant sects and social history to know why Presbyterianism, say, established itself in one place, Methodism in another, while in another the Church of Ireland perhaps kept its monopoly.
I only know that when you belong to a minority like this, and come from a small place like Derryanville, the others who are like you are your real community. Everyone else doesn't understand you. Pluralism is not only unattractive but a profound threat.
I had been afraid that I wouldn't know how to behave. But everything turned out to be easy. The electricity had temporarily failed, so the piano had been pushed half-out the door and a man held an umbrella over it. The lady at it led us most robustly through the hymns. A man in the audience got up and sang some religious songs in slow-waltz time with a candour and simplicity I hardly know.
The electricity came back on. The visiting preacher talked about a passage from the Bible that ends, "the stone the builder rejected has become the cornerstone . . .". The great references and phrases - Ananias and Caiaphas, the Sadducees, All Flesh Must Die, "It is the resurrection that Gives the Cross Its Power" - echoed down the hill, and little brown birds skittered at our feet as we sat in the car-park on our plastic chairs.
After the service a young man of the congregation who was leaving to lecture at King's College, London, was presented with a Bible. On the other side of the hedge, visiting Methodists sat in their cars, to follow the service. "Why don't they come in?" I asked. "They might be shy," someone said.
I understood that I will never understand. But sympathy can genuinely start in places like that car-park. If it can start in one person, then maybe it can in two, then three . . . And is this not the task? Politics will come and go. But we, the people of the island, are going to be here with each other indefinitely. Defining the terms we'll be on with each other begins now.