I FIND it deeply moving that in the middle OF last Saturday night, in the dark, on the inside perimeter of Derry's walls, a small group of Northern Irishmen met to perform actions unique to humanity, Eight or so men from the Bogside Residents Group accompanied 13 Apprentice Boys as the Boys touched the pillars of the four gates of the walled city of Derry, in memory of their besieged forebears.
A few policemen followed the group at a distance. Apart from the reporter from the Sunday Tribune, who is a local, there were no media people present. The Tribune reporter witnessed the event and the description was in that paper. The midnight encounter was not for show. The scene as the men moved quickly from place to place, must have been like something from grand opera, even though these were ordinary young men in jeans.
What they were doing was symbolic. It had to be done and both sides had to be there. It was about those hungers within people that are not material and cannot be satisfied by food and money. It was about imagination and memory and the need for self respect and respect from others without which people and communities can hardly live.
Whatever about the rest of us, the Bogsiders - and the Apprentice Boys understand each other on that level. The Boys had to pay their respects to their tradition. Just as imperatively, the Bogsiders had to assert their civic standing in the present and their right to respect for their own history.
These men, slipping from place to place in the dark and reaching out to touch stone, attract little but derision from the outside world. It offends the indifference of the dominant culture of our times, but Northern Ireland keeps returning to the point that not by bread alone doth man live.
It will be a long time before the passions at the walls in the dark are reduced to theme park harmlessness. On the other hand, one reason to be happy today, and to admire the communities and the community representatives involved in recent negotiations in Derry, is they did not pull the places they inhabit to destruction, either. Yet again, and in spite of Drumcree, the worst did not happen. (Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien's commentary on these matters is back with us, I am heartily glad to say. May he live for a 100 years, and may he be wrong about the North's slide into civil war in every one of them.)
NATIONALIST Derry's expertise in making self righteous PR gestures - remember the canteens of cutlery the Derry City soccer team used to present to their opponents? - has often enough irritated. But behind the righteous front there is, it seems, something righteous - there is a profound debate if not about civic co existence then about self presentation - about themselves as citizenry. We in the south do not respect what an achievement it is to have arrived at a version of the long term future in the name of which a pitched battle was resisted.
There was a chorus of voices in the southern media yesterday shrill with fury because Sinn Fein came out of last week's episode well. You can't help but feel they would have been delighted to see bodies litter the streets of Derry, as long as the bodies were Sinn Fein's fault.
But analysis will get nowhere if it doesn't admit there is good and bad in all contending ideologies in Northern Ireland, nationalism included. It is time to recognise, like it or not, that Sinn Fein, along with the SDLP, represents the people of the west bank of Derry and that the representatives chose not to escalate the parade situation into violence, and that having made the choice, because they really are representative, they could deliver on it.
Similarly, on the unionist side, a choice was made and it, too, must have been the popular, choice. The issues involved in the Apprentice Boys parade past the Bogside were profound. The expectation of violence was there (and didn't A.J.P. Taylor say that one of the causes of the first World War was the expectation that there would be a war?). And yet there was no violence, other than routine teenage rioting.
MEDIA news coverage is about things that happen, not about things that don't happen. And it is about discrete events rather than ongoing processes.
On Radio 1's Saturday View this weekend, an instructive stand off developed between Emily O'Reilly, skilled newswoman that she is, looking for the big picture in Derry, while her panellists, local community workers, refused to discuss anything except the micro truths of their own experience.
At their level, there is hope for the future of Northern Irish society. At the level of abstract description, there isn't much hope. In that way the hysterics of the anti nationalist media in the south really are treasonous, as in the concept of the trahison des clercs.
They deliberately obliterate the ordinary, humane messages that come out of Northern Ireland. They have no interest in the fact that the majority of people in the North of every persuasion would rather not be at war than at war, and would rather go shopping for a fireside chair or take the kids out for a burger than fight with anybody.
A section of southern opinion - reflected in the media - imputes evil and twisted cunning to Northern nationalism at every turn. A section of southern opinion - not reflected in the media - attributes the same to unionism and loyalism. But one of the messages of this last week has been that apocalyptic generalisations are foolish.
There isn't going to be War with a capital W. But neither is there going to be Peace with a P. Nothing huge is going to happen overnight. Surely, a largely peaceful future is going to be constructed over time, with many reverses, by an accretion of tiny increments of peace.
We bystanders have an absolute responsibility to learn to recognise and respect the small things, and not go looking to the North to provide us with thrills. This morning, something like 100 cross community groups will meet, as they do every Monday morning, and go off about their day's patient and complex work.
At the offices of Co Operation North in Belfast, the staff will meet and talk about the weekend and gradually they'll move off to go about their work, unsung, unglamorous, uninteresting as it is to the media. They'll be doing what no one praises - promoting and endorsing cross community and all Ireland understanding, at best, and at worst, keeping understanding alive as an ideal. They are not saints working with savages.
The people of the North know what they are talking about and are capable, even when the most visceral insecurities are involved - as in the last few days in Derry - of drawing back to allow a mutual accommodation. As in Derry. Think of the absolute unlikelihood of Serb and Croat and Muslim meeting in the dark by mutual consent at the bridge in Mostar. Then think of Derry's walls. And hope.