Among the reactions to the Orange Order debacle at Drumcree there have been unhelpful signs of incipient nationalist triumphalism. A fortnight after these events, when some of the emotions of the moment have begun to abate, is, I believe, a good moment to address this issue.
Of course, outside the unionist community the whole Orange parade phenomenon is greeted with almost universal incomprehension. And non-unionists in Ireland and elsewhere find these ritual marches all the more difficult to understand because they see unionists as the dominant group in Northern Ireland - whereas these displays seem to bear the marks of a frightened tribe fearful of losing its identity and consequently seeking self-reassurance in rituals from the past.
But the truth is that, however dominant unionists in Northern Ireland may appear to the minority who live among them, semi-consciously at least they see themselves quite differently: as a threatened minority within the island of Ireland.
Those who persist in seeing them as confidently dominant rather than fearfully insecure should look at the divergent patterns of higher education choices made by pupils of Catholic-managed schools and of other schools in Northern Ireland. In 1996/1997 only 22 per cent of pupils of Catholic-managed schools in Northern Ireland departed to higher education institutions in Britain. But more than twice that proportion, 46 per cent, of the overwhelmingly Protestant pupils of the other schools did so - and only 29 per cent of all Northern Ireland students who graduated in the UK in 1966 returned there on graduation.
These figures offer no support for the concept of a confident, dominant Protestant community. Quite the contrary: they suggest rather that a substantial proportion of its maturing members see no future for themselves in the land of their birth.
The contrast with the Republic is striking - and paradoxical. The 1996 Census has shown that at 40 per cent the proportion of Protestants here who are employed in the higher categories - management, administration, the professions and largescale farming - is twice the proportion of Catholics so employed.
Indeed in many individual higher employment categories Protestant representation is three or four times higher than their proportion of the population as a whole. And the confidence of Southern Protestants in a prosperous future within the Irish State is demonstrated by the fact that in the decades since the second World War the emigration of Protestants from the Republic has consistently been much lower than in the case of Catholics.
Of course, it was as a beleaguered minority in this island that the Protestants of Ulster had always seen themselves during the three centuries between the Ulster Settlement and the division of the island in 1920. And, contrary to what might, perhaps, have been expected, this attitude was not fundamentally affected by Partition. For, deep down, and despite all protestations to the contrary, Partition has never seemed to Northern unionists to be secure and permanent: it has always remained for them unstable and temporary.
Perhaps their centuries-old settlers' fear might have abated had the Northern nationalist minority decided to work the new polity established in 1920, and had our State persisted with early attempts at friendly co-operation. But for a long time Northern nationalists regarded their separation from their Southern compatriots as a temporary phenomenon, and saw no reason to co-operate with what they thought would be a short-lived Northern administration.
They were reinforced in this reaction by the failure of the new Northern Ireland government, despite the good intentions and the goodwill of some of its initial members, to control sectarian discrimination and repressive action by their local security forces.
Meanwhile, in the South a combination of disillusionment with the Boundary Commission fiasco, of preoccupation with the domestic problems of a new State founded in anarchy, and of a reluctance later on by some politicians to forgo the advantages to be gained from populist exploitation of the partition issue, prevented any sustained effort being mounted by governments here to persuade the Northern Ireland and British governments to ensure equitable treatment for the Northern minority.
Thus, feeling threatened by Irish nationalism both internally and externally, in some ways unionists had their fears heightened rather than reduced, by partition. And the fearful defensiveness that this induced was intensified in recent decades by a dawning recognition that the Protestant and imperial Britain to which they had so fearfully attached their loyalty had finally disappeared.
It was in 1968-1969 that this fact first began to come home to unionists. For, when their deep-seated fears led them to react violently to what they mistakenly saw as a threat to their polity emanating from the civil rights campaign, the British Labour government's conciliatory reaction to the nationalist demands that had caused this crisis rapidly precipitated a mood of growing paranoia among the unionist community. And this was, of course, subsequently heightened to an almost apocalyptic level by the IRA's murder campaign.
When the IRA decided to abandon this campaign the Northern unionist community seemed to many outside its ranks to react irrationally to what others have almost universally seen as a constructive development. They seemed to fear the uncertainties of peace more than they feared a continuation of violence.
Already we have been hearing a sinister revival of false claims that Catholics are in the process of outbreeding Protestants - a nationalist myth that in turn feeds cleverly on deep-seated Protestant myths about Catholics. The fact is, of course, that for over a decade the Catholic birth rate has been falling faster than that of Protestants, and Catholic fertility must now be approaching the lower Protestant level, and may go below it.
What is needed now to stabilise the emotional climate of the North is for nationalists to reach out to moderate unionists in a conciliatory way with a view to calming their intensified fears. At this moment it is, I believe, in the power of Northern nationalists by so acting to rally a huge number of decent Protestants to the support of a just and stable society in the North.
We all know the immediate needs: a little generosity by nationalist residents about future Orange parades as well as an IRA declaration that "the war is over".
But of even more importance in the longer term would, I believe, be an indication by the Catholic Church authorities that they will be more open in future to the desire of many Catholic parents - repeatedly expressed in polls over the past 30 years - to have their offspring educated in mixed religious schools, where the children of both communities could get to know and respect each other.
If these three developments were to be seen to follow each other during the weeks ahead, then in the present uncertain climate moderate Protestant opinion could be decisively swung in favour of the new Northern Ireland society foreshadowed by the Belfast Agreement. The recent tactical defeat of the forces of unreason at Drumcree could then become a strategic victory from which these forces would never be able to recover to plague Northern Ireland with their poison.
The Drumcree crisis demonstrated the positive as well as the negative side of Northern Protestantism, in the form of the unambiguous Christian witness borne in that crisis by the leaders of the Presbyterian and Methodist Churches, and most particularly by the Rev William Bingham and Dr Eames - a witness that bore instant positive fruit.
This religious leadership has yet to be echoed in similar dramatic terms on the Catholic side, where the immediate need for a prophetic voice was, perhaps, less evident at the point of climax of the Drumcree crisis. But now there has been time to reflect, and if peace and justice are to prevail, the moment has surely come for the Catholic Church authorities to join with their own flock in recognising the tragic and lethally divisive impact of separate education on the minds of successive generations growing up in Northern Ireland.
Intellectual honesty requires that the evasions and half-truths that have hitherto passed for counter-argument on this issue be now dropped. It may well be the case that Catholic schools in Northern Ireland all teach ecumenism and love of Protestant neighbours - but, if so, it is surely self-evident that, here above all, teaching without practical example is worse than useless.
Moreover to argue, as has been done in the past, that there is no proof that mixed education would make a difference is simply not good enough. There is ample proof that its absence is closely associated with lethal bigotry.
Surely where the Protestant churches have led in witness, standing up to many of their own flock at the risk of losing their support, the Catholic Church in Northern Ireland cannot refuse the lesser challenge of following the lead given by its own flock in the responses they have repeatedly given to questions on this issue since before the violence began in 1968.