Tim Pat Coogan and Michael McDowell were briefly strange allies on RTE's Sunday Show, coming together on the proposition that Northern Ireland is a sick society. Stranded as I was on a mobile phone at Drumcree, and already locked into several other rows, I had no chance to get in on that one.
I was having a particularly interesting exchange with the appalling Brendan MacKenna (the Hibernicised version of whose name I do not use since he adopted it late in life only to annoy unionists), the chairman of the Garvaghy Road Residents' Coalition. Bereft of any other means of intimidation, for I do not live in Portadown, he threatened to sue me if I didn't retract my assessment of his career, his motives and his personality. Just for the record, Mr MacKenna, I stand by every word. Please sue. Court proceedings might be almost as entertaining as those recently involving Mr Thomas "Slab" Murphy.
Some others did confront the Coogan and McDowell duo, particularly the Belfast journalist, Malachi O'Doherty, author of the brave and brilliant The Trouble With Guns, who was trenchant about their offensiveness and smugness.
Throughout the day my resentment of that slur on Northern Ireland and its people grew. First, there was the beam-and-mote aspect of the matter. There are no societies without ailments - some chronic and some acute - and the Republic has its fair share of both. I defend it against those Ulster Protestants who believe it is a corrupt banana republic where paedophile priests prey on the young, but recent scandals haven't helped. More to the point, I would wager that if you brought a coachload of the most deprived people in Northern Ireland - Catholic or Protestant - to Ballymun, Tallaght or parts of inner-city Dublin they would be appalled by the drugs, the crime, the squalor and the hopelessness.
They would be even more appalled if they knew how little the comfortably-off talk about - or care about - the underclass. The republican leadership is well aware of this. An Phoblacht/ Republican News sneers at Irish politicians and Sinn Fein's minions down south turn the misfortunes of the poor to the advantage of ein the organisation.
I don't excuse our Northern Protestant neighbours for being so sweeping in their denunciations of the Republic, but there is even less excuse for us. Scandals not withstanding, Irish citizens are confident: British citizens in Ireland are the frightened minority. The onus is on us to make the effort to get to know and understand them. People like Tim Pat Coogan, Michael McDowell and Ailbhe Smyth, who pronounced magisterially and ignorantly on the nature of Orangeism last Sunday, have a brass neck. Michael is only one of my southern Irish friends who have laughed dismissively when I suggested they might change their minds if they bothered to come to an Orange parade. I've spent years trying to understand the loyal institutions. I know enough to know how far I still have to go. After three decades of republican terrorism, street intimidation and black propaganda, it is preposterous to sneer at unionists for being paranoid and at Orangemen for resisting territorial incursions. As one Orangeman remarked to a friend of mine, "We'd get rid or our siege mentality if they'd lift the f . . .in' siege."
What maddened me more, though, about the "sick society" remark, was its slur on the marvellous majority of the people of Northern Ireland. Catholic and Protestant, nationalist and unionist, they have been dealt a bad hand by history and - for the most part - they have played it with decency and courage. There has hardly been a year during the last 30 when - as now - there haven't been widespread fears that civil war was about to erupt. Latterly, the comparisons have been with the former Yugoslavia. Yet somehow, in the darkest and most dangerous times, the majority of both communities have turned their backs on their violent elements and have continued the struggle to live together with a measure of tolerance. Of course, at times of crisis, the latent hostility between the two tribes surfaces: at times, atavism takes over and sectarian hatreds bubble. But somehow, over the years, the decent people have triumphed.
When the 200-year-old Catholic Church in Crumlin, near Belfast, was burned down last week, the objective of the loyalist thugs responsible was to push the two communities into confrontation. In recent months their republican counterparts have been working vainly towards the same end by trying to stop Orange parades. Peaceful little Crumlin has also had a sectarian murder recently. Yet there has been no intercommunity strife over any of those events. Over and over again the villagers have told the outside world that they are united against violence and bigotry and that they will continue to live together in a spirit of trust and tolerance. The Rev Brian Kennaway, local Presbyterian minister and Orangeman, has been the most savage public critic of loyalist wickedness. Like the many others in both communities who stand up publicly against extremists, he is at risk from both sets of paramilitaries.
At Drumcree I have been meeting many of my friends, some of them pro-agreement, some of them anti, all of them decent. Most of them are ordinary people who have been living for 30 years in extraordinary circumstances. They have been threatened and maligned by republicans and loyalists alike and they have gone doggedly on refusing to yield to intimidation. Bobby Saulters, the Grand Master of the Orange Order, is a sunny-natured accountant. Denis Watson, Grand Master of County Armagh, is a rather diffident mortgage broker. They may belong to an institution which disapproves of Catholicism, they may come from a community that has reason to hate republicans, but they are - by Northern Ireland standards - non-sectarian and resolutely anti-violence. Had they been born in the Home Counties, they would have had quiet, easy, prosperous lives. As it is, they have had to face dilemmas and dangers few people in the Republic could dream of and they find themselves, once more, facing worldwide criticism for doing what they believe to be right. They deserve to be listened to politely by their southern neighbours. They are not sick. Nor is their society. It is merely suffering from an acute flare-up of a chronic ailment.