A line from Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust summed up my feelings on Sunday morning: “Well, I’ll be damned, here comes your ghost again.” I had gone to bed in 2026 and woken up in the mid-1990s, when long drawn-out protests between Orange Order members and local nationalist residents at Drumcree in Portadown, Co Armagh, were as much a part of the summer holidays as ice-cream and trips to the beach.

It was one of only two moments – the other was the unionist response to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 – when I feared that Northern Ireland might actually topple into the abyss, such was the fury between unionists and nationalists. Protests and violence spread across the province and even threatened the nascent peace process, which had begun with the IRA and loyalist ceasefires in August and October 1994.

On July 11th, 1995, following a compromise of sorts with the nationalist protesters who were blocking a parade, David Trimble and Ian Paisley, their hands joined aloft, led the march back down Garvaghy Road. It was this moment of supposed triumph that was reckoned to have earned Trimble the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party two months later. Ironic, really, because it is unlikely that any of the other four contenders would have delivered the Belfast Agreement. After another two years of summer protests and violence, in 1996 and 1997, the parade was barred from its “traditional route” in 1998 and has not completed it since.

So why is it back on the agenda 28 years later? Partly because it has remained with the unsorted baggage and unfinished business that wasn’t dealt with when the Belfast........

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