It is hardly a mark of the supposedly innate tolerance of Irish nationalism that Orangemen have been unable to walk any streets outside the historic province of Ulster since the 1930s. That such a march might only occur in the capital after a gap of over 60 years suggests how threadbare that tolerance has run.
The truth is that Orangemen with Dublin accents and Dublin addresses marched in the centre of the capital for the first 15 years of independence. Perhaps it is not coincidental that green mobs were permitted to end the Orange marches in Dublin in the very same year that de Valera introduced the Constitution which awarded a special place to the Catholic church.
Imposed past
For most of the last century, a past was imagined and imposed, through schooling and by political will, upon the collective memory of the Irish people; and somehow or other this culminated in excluding two things: first, that Orangeism was once widespread in the 26 Counties; and second, the right for Orangemen to celebrate their day. Thus it became a universal truth: there are no Orange parades in free Ireland because Orangeism is a British-inspired Ulster disorder completely foreign to Free Ireland. Here in the Free State, Eire, the Republic, we are all the same: Irish through and through.
It is not hard to find the reason for this laborious denial: few neutral observers in 19th-century Dublin were unmoved by the sight of the Orangemen lording it over the majority in their season of July. But there was something straightforward about such supremacism. Orangemen, after all, did not proclaim the unity of their colour and of green. Republicans - as they termed themselves: and many a creature lived within that cloak - insisted they were all-inclusive, hence the orange in the Tricolour. Yet when the truest republicans of all came to power, the Orange marches ceased, the Memorial Park in Islandbridge for the dead of the Great War was never opened, Ireland became a Catholic state with Catholic laws, and we settled into our grim Elysium of poverty, exile and despair.
There is no spotless custodian of liberal virtue here. I spoke to one of the last survivors of the old pre-Independence Dublin Orange working class culture some 10 years ago. He was not himself an Orangemen, though his brothers had been. He looked back on the time of his youth, before the first World War, with something approaching shame, so deep was the supremacist bigotry of the caste to which he belonged. Odd, divisive dynamics were at work throughout the island; Ireland was - and remained - a deeply neurotic country, obsessed with political Holy Grails unrelated to what was actually achievable.
War memorial
But what was notionally achievable then is nothing compared with what has actually been achieved in the post-Haughey era of the past decade. That 18 months ago a Fianna Fail President from North Belfast, in the company of the Queen - and I use the last term deliberately: are we in the habit of casually referring to any other monarch? - opened a memorial to the Irish dead of the Great War marked an astonishing passage over a hitherto unassailably maiden threshold. The recognition of the Irish in the Great War is now such a commonplace that there is an entire exhibition of paintings of yesterday's battlefields as they stand today by the artist Roger O'Reilly at the Cobalt Gallery in North Great George's Street.
It was not so long ago that no-one in the Republic would have contemplated the relevance of that landscape to our own history; today it is accepted without question. It is merely a truth that was airbrushed out of public memory, State commemoration and school syllabus, and which is today being steadily re-installed in the public consciousness.
The recognition of the realities of what we are, rather than what we want to be, takes many forms. So now Orangemen's shoe-leather will once again be heard, if but briefly, on Dawson Street. Of course, we have heard criticisms of the march from those who regard the possession of tribal neurosis as a badge of national honour, and who querulously point to the events on the Garvaghy Road as reason for not having a march down Dawson Street in Dublin.
Group punishment
Is this reversion to broad-stroke, illiberal illogic to be a basis for policy generally? Should the Northern authorities ban Orange marches because of events at Drumcree, or is hostility to the Orange to be the privilege of the Legion of the Rearguard in Leinster House? And is punishment for a particular offence to be inflicted generally on a group? Yes? But if every IRA transgression of its ceasefire, every knee-capping, every ghetto murder, had entailed exclusion of Sinn Fein from talks with governments, how long would the peace process have lasted?
Neurosis is by no means a green monopoly. The drowning-man embrace of the name RUC by the Unionist Party, against the strongly expressed wishes of that forces' own officers, is in essence a group disorder masquerading as policy, more a matter for the anthropologist to deal with than the political scientist. So maybe at this critical, possibly terminal, stage in the peace process, we should recognise the insignificance of Dublin Orangemen's feet outside Dail Eireann. If we allow that trivial episode to exercise our body politic, if we allow the tribal neurotics from Sinn Fein to make important what is not, we are a lesser people than we have been telling ourselves.