Important and all as it was, the Assembly election was the quietest Irish election I ever experienced. I never saw a canvasser, and there were only a few posters. Nobody talked about it. You can't talk about things like that in general company in the North. People keep their real views for the company of their own. The result, even, isn't immediately interesting. If you were waiting for the political scene to keep you happy in Northern Ireland, you'd wait a long time. Fortunately, there are other things to do with the summer. Collecting material for the bonfires is one. It comes as a real shock, the first time you see one of the piles. They're like the great untidy nests of mammoth birds. Even unlit they intimidate. Whole rolls of carpet, thick rafters, armchairs, the wooden spools cable is wound around, tyres. The bonfires are like pagan towers in the neat municipal landscape.
There's a very big one outside the blocks of loyalist flats on the Lagan embankment opposite the Botanic Gardens. "Up the UVF" is painted on the wall behind it. Last week, on a rare evening of golden sun, people lolled on the grass beside the bonfire site and watched the crowd shuffling along on the other side of the river to get into the open-air Bob Dylan and Van Morrison concert. In the North young people, especially, say, "Nothing ever happens here," or "Nobody ever comes here." But two of the biggest stars in the world had touched down that night.
A most diverse crowd made its way to the entrance, past the woman shaking the Peace People bucket, past the rough security men who were searching bags, past groups of shaven-headed young men in drooping blue jeans and ear-rings, finishing off their bottles.
A man was thrusting a leaflet at the concert-goers. "Both Bob Dylan and Van Morrison deal with many important issues in their songs," part of it read. "They search for answers to questions such as: `Where did we come from and where are we going?' The answer to your questions is not `blowing in the wind'. The answer you are searching for is a personal, living relationship with the Lord Jesus." We were in Ulster, after all.
The grass was already littered with burger wrappers. The lines of Portaloos smelt. A long, long queue stretched to the one beer tent (no cans, no shorts, plastic glasses only). It just wasn't a Californian scene. Not when the girls have strapmarks in their raw tans, and the smoke coming off the burger-bar smells of old oil, not charcoal,
But turn a corner and there, unbelievably, in the half-shell of the stage, his shades reflecting the setting sun, was the little man himself. That unique nasal drone rode the whine of the electric guitar out into the Belfast air. "He looks like one of them waiters you get in Spain," the kid beside me said. "The ones that come up to you with a band in cafes, playing the mariachis. All he needs is a sombrero."
But "tangled up in blue" the master wailed, and his harmonica wailed with him. Anyone in the audience who was older than 35 - and there were many such - found them themselves transported back to the 20th century's most durable alternative world.
But Van meant more to the crowd. Sure you could nearly see Van's house from the park. There was nothing but sour, deprecating remarks about him before he came on (a characteristic local way of keeping feelings private, and guarding against disappointment). But once he stomped on in that hat, and took over the show, he had such absolute command that he got even the cavalry twills rocking to Days Like This. His wan, dense face and rich bluesy voice scooped up the whole occasion, and made it thrilling.
For a time this wasn't Belfast. The shy darkened and last-minute wisps of evening cloud appeared in the navy-blue. Even the army helicopter shimmered and sparkled high up in the sunset. Even married couples wound their arms around each other.
The crowd made their contented way back into town along the tree-lined stretch of the river which is the cruising-ground of some of Belfast's gays. There are times when you can live in Northern Ireland as if it were anywhere else at all.
Next night, in Ballycastle, the native tradition answered back. Or it was scheduled to. There was an Ulster Fleadh on, and through the sheets of rain you could indeed see sturdy old men with fiddle-cases disappearing up the alleyways beside pubs. But the rain was the main event.
There was that quintessential tableau from the Irish summer: an open-topped lorry parked in the town square with a line of chairs on it, and taped Irish dance music coming from its speakers, and rain bouncing off the chairs and the speakers and sluicing down the deserted street. Maybe rain like that will come on bonfire night, and be as deleterious to expressions of Orange culture as it was to green.
The election, and now the period of rancour and point-scoring and dealing while the politicians learn how to run an Assembly, keeps public life going. To have an Assembly to assemble is a hundred times better than the situation that obtained this time last year.
But electoral politics is not itself the point. The point is the people, and the making of a society in which the greatest number can live without harm or harming. When you see Northern Ireland at play you wish very strongly that these men and women and children - the body politic, for there is no other - will be able to use the Assembly to find a way out of the past.
You don't feel this on specifically political occasions: few things can make you more unsympathetic to Northern Ireland than listening to politicians. But when you see a couple of boys bopping up and down the grass and the crowd around smiling at them, or listen to the crack ricocheting around a Ballycastle pub between men called Billy and Seamus and Sean and Robert, then you think: why should this corner of the world have been so blighted by history? Why shouldn't it get a decent chance at a decent future?
In the snug of a Ballycastle pub a group of happy girls from Limerick, who'd been placed that day in a dancing competition, were trying to get the money together to fill the silver cup they'd won with milk and Tia Maria. They were the first Southerners I'd come across in a long time. Since Canary Wharf, the flood of visitors to the North from across the Border seems to have dried up.
Yet now is the beginning of the active and legitimate influence of Northern Ireland on our affairs. Now the North-South dimension takes on meaning. Now would be a good time to get to like, or at least to encounter with a view to liking, our Northern brothers and sisters. Of course, there are the marches to get through first. And the bonfires. But just because that's what you see on the television doesn't make it the whole picture. Any more than elections are the whole of life.