Economists will tell us you can’t have inflation and deflation at the same time. But then they’ve never been to Portadown. The trick of tribal politics is to combine bigging-up with belittlement. Grievance is magnified; grief is diminished.

On one side of the Drumcree/Garvaghy Road standoff, there is a monstrous mismatch between the supposed grand purpose of the Orange parade and its mean little reality.

The march is claimed to be a commemoration not only of the Battle of the Boyne, but of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, in which there were over a million casualties, including about 300,000 deaths. This was a catastrophe shared by Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics – around 3,500 men from the island of Ireland, serving in the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions, lost their lives.

How should a European cataclysm of such unimaginable dimensions be commemorated? What form of ritual solemnity could be expressive of a deep enough sorrow? How about walking down a road just to get a rise out of the neighbours?

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There is only one thing that joins the Somme and the Drumcree parade – a profound sense of futility. In the theatre of the absurd, the Somme is the tragic epic, Drumcree the am-dram village-hall staging of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks........

© The Irish Times