Although it's some forty years since it was written, one of the best short analyses of the situation in the North of Ireland in the previous century is in Bernadette Devlin's "The Price of my Soul" (it was Nickhere's penultimate paragraph that reminded me of it). For what it's worth, in one village in Donegal - one of the Counties of Ulster, though in the Republic - there are Orange parades on or around the Twelfth of July, and the whole community turns out either to participate or applaud; the place is Rosapenna. Mind you, back in the 1960s, Taoiseach Jack Lynch said that in a United Ireland all traditions would be respected equally; call these what you will, Nationalist, Loyalist, Republican, Unionist, Orange, Green, Catholic, Protestant, Free Stater, Fenian, Peep o'Day, Whiteboys (we're getting really historical now). On a lighter note, there's an RTE programme called "Failte Isteach", and a couple of years ago the presenter pointed out that, throughout Europe, all borders are gone; he then played a recording of Dominic Behan's "Thank God we're surrounded by Water". As his brother Brendan once misquoted it,

"The Sea, the Sea, a gradh geal mo chroidhe,
Long may you roll between England and me;
God help the poor Scotchmen - they'll never be free,
But we're entirely surrounded by water."