The sound of drums being beaten along one of Belfast's main thoroughfares signalled the start of the marching season on Tuesday. The cricket season started a few days earlier.
While the men in white dusted down their bats, Orangemen were unfolding sashes and unfurling banners in preparation for the next five months when around 2,500 marches and loyalist parades will take place across Northern Ireland.
For the most part they will be uncontroversial. Small marches through rural villages, fund-raising band parades on Friday and Saturday nights, dignified Orange and Black Preceptory marches through largely Protestant towns - all causing little more inconvenience than tailbacks and traffic jams.
The ones that will make the headlines come around the time of the July 12th celebrations - marches such as the one at Drumcree in Portadown and the Lower Ormeau Road in Belfast.
In recent years the street protests and blockades caused by these parades has brought the North to a standstill. If you live here, you put up with it, people say. Either that, or you take your annual holidays in July.
The season was due to start on Easter Monday with a planned Apprentice Boys march on the Ormeau Road - nationalist residents opposing it announced they would protest. In the event, the escalating foot-and-mouth problem caused the cancellation of the event to which they were heading in Limavady, Co Derry, so the march did not take place.
The epidemic means the order may be forced to scale back the number of marches, but for the moment, a source said, things are going ahead as planned.
Not all parades are held by the Orange Order. Figures from the Chief Constable's report showed that last year 3,383 parades took place, of which almost 80 per cent were organised by loyalist groups. Just over 200 were nationalist.
According to Mr George Patton, executive officer of the Grand Lodge of the Orange Order, many of the parades are held by loyalist pipe bands, which are not members of the order, to raise funds for instruments and uniforms. The figure also includes parades held all year round by youth organisations such as the Boys' Brigade and the scouting movement.
While more than a hundred of the more controversial marches were rerouted last year, the report noted that disruption occurred at only nine of the more than three thousand parades.
Cancellation of the Twelfth due to foot-and-mouth would be greeted with considerable relief by those who find the thumping drums, pipe music and marching feet intimidating or just plain annoying. Billed as colourful and festive by the order, for the outsider the Twelfth in Belfast is more memorable for the sight of shutters pulled down on pubs, shops and restaurants or streets littered with burger wrappers and beer cans.
Contacted about the effects of the marches on business around that time, those in the tourism industry were reluctant to comment. Voicing disapproval or anger could jeopardise potential custom from prominent Orangemen or those sympathetic to their cause.
One successful businesswoman found it "unbelievable" that the road around a normally busy Shaftesbury Square in the city centre could be closed off for one of those marches on a Saturday afternoon.
"If Northern Ireland Electricity wanted to close a road, they would have to put an ad in the paper to warn people, but they just get away with it," she said, adding that, around the July period, "business just dries up".
She didn't know what life was like in Northern Ireland around that time because she had never stayed around to find out. "We clear off to Donegal. I don't know anybody who stays. There would be no point."
A spokeswoman for the Northern Ireland Tourist Board said that while hotels had traditionally relied on July and August for their best occupancy figures, recent statistics showed a downturn during that period. The threat of the civil unrest around the climax of the marching season in July ensured that visitor numbers were low.
"It has been suggested that in the right circumstances parades could become a tourist attraction, forming part of local festivals as a celebration of our culture, just as St Patrick's Day is celebrated," she said. "This would require a resolution to current difficulties but such an achievement would undoubtedly restore confidence in tourism over the summer months."
Asked why there were so many marches, parades and demonstrations from Easter to late August, Mr Patton said marching was part of the psyche of people in Northern Ireland.
"Parades are part of the Protestant ethos, they pre-date the Orange Order in Northern Ireland . . . nationalist culture is expressed through Gaelic sports, Irish dancing and music. Marching is a major way of expressing Ulster Protestant tradition and identity," he said.
Conceding that people had different opinions about the marches, he said the events held through the marching season were "colourful and lively. They should be treated the way parades are in many other parts of the world."
Mr Frank Caddy, chief executive of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, said it was the political fallout which caused problems. "In the days leading up to July 12th, it has meant an 80 per cent loss of business . . . speaking on behalf of some of my members, they get quite angry because their livelihood is being attacked. Visitors vote with their feet and hoteliers had a disastrous time last year," he said.
"Having said that, Bill Clinton's circus last December was the biggest parade ever in Belfast . . . and it was also the worst day's trading anyone can remember in the city."