THE situation around the Garvaghy Road is one of those periodic reminders, even for those of us right at the other end of the country, that peace cannot simply be taken for granted.

It doesn’t take much, does it? An old dispute returns and those distant echoes from the past suddenly sound much closer.

The Good Friday Agreement was an extraordinary achievement. But it could not make everybody agree about history, identity or the country they wanted to live in. It gave us a framework for managing those differences without returning to the agony that had gone before.

And why not? For all its difficulties, look at what it helped us leave behind.

There was compromise. There were arrangements that nobody would have chosen if they had been writing the whole thing themselves. There was an acceptance that people could share a place without sharing an understanding of it.

Perhaps some of us hoped that, given enough time, the old arguments would lose their force. Then somewhere like Drumcree reminds us that an argument can grow quiet without going away.

I find the insistence on marching along a route where residents object........

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