DON’T LET them wind you up. Don’t take the bait. It was my Da’s way of saying ‘turn the other cheek’, and though no one ever expects you to be a full-on Christian, there was practical good sense in passing up the opportunity for a fight.

Or as the girls would sing, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me’.

They were taught that rhyme so that they might recover their confidence when others jeered at them or remarked on their looks.

This was all good, sound advice for children but apparently unacceptable as a tenable formula for peacemaking in Northern Ireland between its big Protestant and Catholic communities when they irritate each other. Hence, I seem to be in a minority when I take the position I do in relation to the massive confrontation in Portadown at the end of last month.

First the background. In the 1990s several nationalist/Catholic communities raised objections to Orange Order parades passing through their neighbourhoods. In Northern Ireland many, perhaps most, towns, villages and housing estates are predominantly of one community or the other. Orangemen marching through Catholic areas and beating their drums were seen as lording it triumphantly over a minority community which had already been subjected to discrimination in........

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