`It is a decisive turning point. For most of the past 170 years, the threat of the Orange card has been played successfully. This year, for the first time, it hasn't worked." The voice was that of a respected senior Protestant layman speaking in Belfast this week.
"This time, the Order was faced down. The republican movement had to learn that it couldn't get its way through violence, and had to find another way. Now the Orange Order has found out that too, and it will have to learn another way, if it can."
The Orange Order's tragedy is that it is unlikely to find that other way. For most Orangemen live in a time warp, in a world which has long passed. That world lives on in the symbols on Orange banners: of the British empire conquering the world, of Belfast as a great industrial city and of the Protestant Bible as God's unerring guide to the nation.
In fact, the empire is gone; Belfast is a small provincial city heavily dependent on hand-outs from London; and Britain is no longer a Christian country.
The same fierce resistance to change can be seen in miniature in the determination of the small group of mainly elderly Orangemen who insist on marching down Belfast's Ormeau Road. Most no longer live in the Ormeau Road area, once overwhelmingly working class and Protestant, but now increasingly being taken over by young, middle-class Catholics.
"Losers" is a word which has been applied to the Orangemen a lot in recent days. They fought at Drumcree from a position of weakness - feeling that they were constantly giving ground to the nationalist enemy - and, most crucially, did not have any exit strategy when the Quinn tragedy in Ballymoney made their position untenable.
"The Orange Order is the classic Protestant polity. The power is at the grass-roots and the centre is not able to tell its people what to do. That was a fatal weakness in its structure at Drumcree. The most intransigent crowd, the Portadown Orangemen, led everyone to disaster," said one observer.
"The Orange Order couldn't lead anybody anywhere. It is more accurate to say that it now reflects the fragmentation within unionism."
The fault-lines in the Order are clear to see. Some are political: for example, the attempt by men like Dennis Watson and Joel Patton, backed by the Rev Ian Paisley and his DUP, to use the Drumcree protest to undermine David Trimble and thus destroy the Belfast Agreement.
The likelihood is that the Portadown Orangemen will continue their protest throughout the summer by mounting a Greenham Common-style camp outside the church. They will hope to use this as a rallying point, both to up the ante in their relentless demand to march down the road and to raise the pressure on David Trimble on issues such as decommissioning when the Assembly reconvenes in mid-September.
The Ulster Unionist leader can also expect trouble on another Orange front. Jeffrey Donaldson, the anti-Belfast Agreement MP and Deputy Grand Master of the Order, unashamedly used the Twelfth celebration to call for a new unionist movement which he clearly sees himself leading. He remarked on the feelings of decline, disillusionment and defeatism within contemporary unionism.
Some of the divisions are more religious. It was noticeable how quickly the Orange chaplains lined up to support the call of their Co Armagh colleague, the Rev William Bingham, to call off the protest after Ballymoney. The Church of Ireland may finally be shamed into increasing the powers of its bishops to ensure that its property cannot be used for yet another deeply embarrassing repeat of this year's violent events around one of its churches.
The other mainstream denomination from which large numbers of Orangemen come, the Presbyterian Church, has also backed Mr Bingham, one of its own. There is a strong but hitherto quiescent anti-Orange element among Presbyterian clergy. It will now be able to criticise the Orange Order indirectly by echoing Mr Bingham's concerns about the need for it to stay within the law and not call out onto the streets people it cannot control.
Informed observers say that some of the hardest people in Orangeism in Belfast and Portadown now come from smaller sects outside the Protestant mainstream. Several mainstream chaplains who have resigned in recent years have been replaced by fundamentalist Gospel hall-type preachers, often holding apocalyptic beliefs about Northern Ireland's role as the last bastion of Bible-based Protestantism and its people as the lost tribe of Israel.
The Armagh County Grand Master, Denis Watson, is a member of the Salvation Army. The Belfast leadership of this small evangelistic, band-playing group is said to be close to despair at the activities of some of its Portadown members. It is another example of how many grass-roots Protestants, always extremely individualistic at the best of times, are now totally impervious to church leaders' exhortations to moderation.
There are also geographical differences. The Orange leadership in Co Antrim is heavily influenced by Mr Patton's hard-line Spirit of Drumcree group. The Co Armagh leadership is equally unyielding.
However, it was noticeable how quickly the Co Down leadership wound up its protest outside Hillsborough Castle as the news of the Ballymoney deaths came through. Leading Orange figures in counties Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone were known to be uncomfortable about the violent turn of events surrounding Drumcree even before Sunday's tragedy.
Of course, the most fundamental faultline, underpinning the whole Orange edifice, is sectarianism. It is no coincidence that the Drumcree standoff took place in Co Armagh, probably the place in Northern Ireland where the social and religious apartheid between the two communities is deepest.
In a recent study of church and community relations in the area, the highly-regarded University of Ulster sociologist, Dr Duncan Morrow, found that many Catholics talked about "civil relationships which were terminated for the month of July, during which there was no contact except public exchange of insults". People do not enter the other side's churches at any time.
He goes on: "Normality in Armagh includes the acceptance of these rules. Acknowledging the distance is, literally, common sense. It may be socially deviant to break these rules. It may even be thought to be evil. It may appear to be a question of foul compromises. It is occasionally dangerous. People who pay for crossing lines are thought to have contributed heavily to their own downfall. Meeting and really risking finding out about the `other', being honest about fundamental disagreements, takes a degree of civil courage."
In such a fear-filled morass, political reform is a painful, slow and often largely superficial process. As the MPs for Upper Bann and Newry and Armagh respectively, David Trimble and Seamus Mallon know this only too well.
They also know that in the appalling game of brinkmanship that is Northern Ireland at a time of crisis, the burning to death of three small boys, and the intervention of one brave Orange chaplain, saved the North from tipping into the abyss. Right up to last weekend, the Ulster Unionist leader was warning of massive confrontation and inevitable loss of life if Orangemen were not let down the Garvaghy Road.
Mr Trimble, in particular, knows that despite the humiliation of the Orange Order - the Order of which he has been a member all his adult life - most of his problems remain.
He has survived his first baptism of fire with his authority enhanced because of a courageous joint stand with his nationalist Deputy First Minister. He still has a wafer-thin majority on the unionist benches of the Assembly. He still has the support of few of his colleagues at Westminster. He still has to find a formula which will persuade his deeply sceptical and insecure fellow unionists that the IRA's political wing is really committed to non-violence, thus allowing him to sit in government with them.
An exit poll in last month's Assembly elections showed that those Protestants voting for anti-agreement candidates tended to be both poorer and more pessimistic. They believed a resumption of violence was inevitable. The talk among the Orangemen in Portadown last week was strikingly similar.
"Quite a lot of those Protestants would go with the agreement if they could be sure it would lead to an end to violence. Symbolically, the best thing the republicans could do now would be to declare that the war is over," said the senior Protestant layman who believes the Orange Order was taught a historic lesson at Drumcree.