A plenary meeting of the Northern Ireland Assembly starts in Parliament Buildings today at 2 p.m. Thirty years ago in Derry, at exactly the same time, several hundred people were preparing to take part in a banned civil rights march from Duke Street in the Waterside area to a rally in the city centre.
Almost 10 times as many people were in the Brandywell stadium, watching Derry City, then in the Irish League, beating Distillery 32.
Many observers believe that the tactics employed by the police to stop the original march lit a fire that burned for almost 30 years. Several dozen of those who took part in an anniversary parade on Saturday were also on the original march.
Tension was replaced by good-natured banter as many of the veterans met people they hadn't seen since October 5th, 1968.
This time, instead of stopping the parade, a small number of police officers walked ahead of the marchers as they made their way, with surprising speed, across Craigavon Bridge to Guildhall Square.
The marchers symbolically halted for 30 seconds at the junction where they were originally forcibly stopped by the police. A former SDLP politician, Mr Ivan Cooper, made his way to the 1968 march from the Strand Road RUC station.
"I had been arrested that morning along with Charles Morrison and Eamonn McCann. We had been broadcasting the march and we were arrested at 10.30 in the morning. Upon my release, the police gave me a loudhailer with the intention of me calling the march off. I'm afraid I used that loudhailer to explain why the march was proceeding."
The march went ahead, and the rest is history.
"After years of nationalist agitation which didn't really succeed, in the civil rights movement we managed to achieve those rights in a short period of time.
"The problem," said Mr Cooper, "was that the non-violent organisation was later hijacked by those devoted to violence. There is no doubt that the street protests were hijacked by people with other objectives. If that had been prevented, there would have been no need for the subsequent campaign of violence which I strongly opposed.
"It wasn't worth the loss of life that occurred, but I do believe that the civil rights movement was non-sectarian and to that extent I am very proud to have been a member of it."
There are still civil rights issues to be addressed in Derry in 1998, he said, particularly the situation of the minority Protestant population. "On the west bank of Derry there are only 1,000 Protestant people living. We have a duty to defend the rights of that minority and that means taking decisions which are not always popular but which are fundamentally important."
Members of the Young Communists of Ireland marched in Derry 30 years ago. One of them, Peter McCullagh, a computer analyst, has returned home to Portaferry from the United States, where he lived for 20 years.
"I had a red flag in my hand on the original march," he says. "I was standing right beside the police, and when the inspector gave the order to charge a constable grabbed hold of the flag. I wouldn't let it go, so I was hammered on the head.
"Here in the North, things take a long time to change and I just hope today's anniversary march doesn't end the way it did the last time I was here," he said.
One of the organisers of the original march, Mr Willie Breslin, said middle-class Catholics and unionist politicians "sectarianised" the issues which the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association campaigned for.
"It was certainly the intention of the unionist establishment that it should become sectarian because it protected them from unrest from working-class Protestants.
"In those days we protested against alienation, about housing, about exclusion and about a community not receiving the support they should. I have been talking to Protestants recently and they have protests now. The shoe is on the other foot now. The local council is controlled by nationalists and Protestants find it very difficult to get a hearing.
"Thirty years ago we intended to light a fuse of non-violent protest, but what in fact happened is other people took over the organisation, took over the protest, moved in and drove the people off the street. The gun war was not our intention and it has only created wounds.
"Looking back, we should have tried harder to expose those who made it a sectarian, a Catholic demonstration. We should have fought a great deal harder than we did to prevent that, but the main thrust of the protest was taken over by middle-class Catholics even though appalling housing conditions in Catholic areas were no different to those in Protestant areas."
Mr Johnny White, one of the organisers of the original march, rejects the claim that the civil rights movement was hijacked.
"That is not necessarily true but it has to be admitted that the biggest input on the ground was from the republican movement. Basic things like the distribution of leaflets, publicity and organisation were left to people who represented the republican movement.
"But it was not taken over by the republican movement, which I was a member of. We didn't intentionally try to take anything over. There was no hidden agenda.
"The RUC overreacted to a demonstration by a few hundred people and today I ask myself why it wasn't allowed to go ahead. Events here 30 years ago only brought forward events which would have happened anyway," he said.
At Saturday's commemorative march and rally in Derry, Mr Finbarr O Dochartaigh said insecurity was a fear among many working-class people.
"We have workers facing redundancies in companies such as Fruit of the Loom and the City Factory. Derry has a low-paid economy. There are people working for a couple of pounds an hour.
"Although progress has been made over the last 30 years, we must plan for the future and not look back. The working class couldn't depend on the politicians in 1968 and we can't depend on them today," he said.