I usually keep out of these threads, except to point out that referring to "the English" in any particular way is as bad as saying that all NI Catholics are Republicans, and hence active supporters of the IRA (as was said on the radio here the other week - my jaw dropped). However, one explanation for the greater reaction to Green as opposed to Orange threads could be that Unionist (I won't say Loyalist) violence has tended to stay at home, while IRA violence has hit us here, and has hit many who we believe to be totally unconnected with the strife, such as children. We probably all know someone who has been affected in some way or other. My brother-in-law walked out of a pub to talk to someone shortly before the bomb in it exploded. That is the good news part of it. Psychologically, he has not recovered. Most of us do not know anyone damaged by the Unionists. Most of us find that their behaviour is incomprehensible, and when reminded about the way they dealt with the Catholics in NI when they had the rule there find it hard to believe that it was part of the UK. That sort of thing (we may feel) was native to other places - the old slave states of the USA, South Africa, Queensland. We do not like to recognise that it happened here. But it has not touched us so personally as the bombs.

I put this forward as a possible explanation for the reactions stirred up here. I don't think it is because we are closet Orange supporters. I don't believe I have ever met anyone who supports them. (The nearest I've ever come to meeting one of those is a conservative with a mystical belief in the "Union" of all these islands which lacks any sort of rational grounding or recognition that people differ. Someone who does not feel comfortable with knowing that another person does not a) hunt, b) like dogs, c) believe that wearing a corset is an essential rite of passage to maturity and d) does not care about these distinctions.)

Most of us want peace. But it is a hellishly difficult situation to solve, because we have to start from here and now, and not from the Saturday before Bloody Sunday, not from Partition, not from the Plantations and alll those other mistakes. Which is the situation with all those other problems of territory and sovereignty in the world. We can't do it the old way with a pencil and a map. We have to work with real people's lives, when they all have equal rights to have their lives respected.

Penny