Claims that sectarianism had nothing to do with the murders of three children in Ballymoney last weekend were treated with derision.
Rightly so. The atmosphere in which Christine Quinn's home was petrol-bombed was heavy with sectarian menace.
It oozed from the field at Drumcree and hung like a blight over the Carnany estate, where the Quinns lived, and over many another estate and isolated home in Northern Ireland.
The attempts of Ian Paisley and some Orange leaders to escape responsibility for its poisonous effects - by hinting at other reasons for the attack on the Quinns - were grotesque and obscene.
Mr Paisley knows how his words are heard by the young men most likely to act on them, either as a stand for his brand of religion or politics or as an excuse to bully or burn out their neighbours.
You don't have to take an outsider's word for it. Those who once took Mr Paisley at his word now turn up regularly, as members of the Ulster Democratic Party or the Progressive Unionist Party, to challenge him.
These walking reminders of a dangerous past have paid his price; they've done their time.
But there are others who still get the message - from Mr Paisley or unbending Orangemen - and interpret the calls to action in the way they know best.
The people they terrorise are, for the most part, working-class like themselves; Catholics, especially those who are married to or living with Protestants, often in areas where people of different religions live side by side.
The cruel irony that Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn, aged 11, 10 and nine, did not belong to any church - to avoid being considered different in their estate, according to their uncle - would have meant nothing to their murderers.
But it cannot have escaped the attention of those who deliberately raised the temperature, knowing that in moments of real or imagined crisis their's are the voices the excited or fearful want to hear.
They must not be allowed to shrug off responsibility for the random, if indirect, consequences of the rhetoric on which they've built their political careers.
And they aren't alone, you know, though they do things differently on the other side. Some nationalist politicians and paramilitaries also trade on old and knowing rhetoric, also exploit fears raised by sectarianism and sectarian displays.
This is not to propose a competition in guilt and glory, another bout in the endless rounds of ah-but-ery which cloud every conversation about Northern politics.
Rather is it a reminder of events which received relatively little attention during a week in which unionists and Orangemen seemed to wrestle first with each other and then with some unusually combative interviewers on RTE.
The divisions in unionism are not new. They've have been visible since Terence O'Neill's faint promise of reform 30 years ago. They were not so much exposed as underlined by Drumcree and all that went with it.
Now, though, there are two divisions: one between the supporters and opponents of the Belfast Agreement; the other between believers in an unbreakable link between religion and politics and those who recognise that the mix is dangerous and out of date.
Bob McCartney's UK Unionists are in favour of integration and are, therefore, opposed to the Assembly on principle - we have yet to see how this is translated into practice.
The Orange Order's division so far seems to be about tactics and practice, as illustrated by the dispute between Joel Patton of the Spirit of Drumcree and one of the order's chaplains, William Bingham, at Pomeroy.
It may well run deeper than questions of crowd control, though if it raises serious doubts about the mixture of politics and religion so much the better.
As Henry Patterson observed wryly on Saturday View, the last threat of a split in the order was averted by the even greater threat of Home Rule.
It's still a potent threat, which may yet heal or at any rate reduce unionist divisions.
Billy Hutchinson believed this week that he detected an air of triuumphalism in nationalist reactions to the predicaments of supposedly triumphal unionism.
Coverage in the Republic and Britain was bound to be unsympathetic, to say the least, in the aftermath of Drumcree and Ballymoney.
In some cases, frustration with unionism turned to indiscriminate hostility and equally thoughtless nationalism.
John Bruton reminded readers of this newspaper that there were "no clean hands in Northern Ireland" and urged church leaders to tell their followers "of their specific moral obligation to make named concessions to the other community. Otherwise, we are not too far away from a Bosnian-style conflict."
Proinsias De Rossa said: "The first prerequisite for the ending of sectarianism is an acknowledgement that it is not the sole preserve of any one side and that there is an equal responsibility on all to fight it."
He reminded the Government of its commitment in the Downing street Declaration to recommend ways in which agreement and trust between the traditions might be promoted.
A committee of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation had studied obstacles to reconciliation in the Republic. It was the last and most difficult of the forum's committees. Its work ended on the day the IRA set off its bomb in Canary Wharf. The committee's report has not been published.
The threat of republican violence is still present, though its sources are more diverse now and less predictable. While all eyes were on Drumcree, two bombs were found on the roads of Northern Ireland, one of 500 lb in Newry, the other, estimated at 1,400 lb, in Armagh.
Little enough attention was paid to those discoveries, although there has been some coverage of the new groups and alignments beginning to appear under a variety of titles, including the Real IRA. They represent the danger of which commentators warned before discussions about the future of Northern Ireland began - when there was much speculation about the possibility of a split on the republican side if Sinn Fein turned to politics.
But, as both supporters and opponents of the Belfast Agreement realise, it will take time - perhaps months of nervousness and sporadic violence - for the politics to work. Meanwhile, there are those who'd walk a million miles to be insulted; and others who'd walk a million miles to insult them.
Some unionists complain about what they see as nationalists' encroachments and describe the limitation of their displays in the disputed areas as territorial apartheid.
Some on the other side continue to talk gleefully about the prospect of outbreeding the unionists: the insemination once-again version of nationalism.
And some - a clear majority - look to the day when people in Northern Ireland don't have to be either unionist or nationalist, Catholic or Protestant, and children are safe from those who find them guilty of being born on the wrong side.