THE people of Ulster are by and large like other people. They love peace and thirst for order. They want to get on with their lives.

For many years, there was doubt about this. The citizens of the ungovernable province were often seen ash accomplices in their own disaster, with an incorrigible taste for sectarian battle. The last two years have made the untruth of such an intelligible prejudice clear to all the world.

They have exposed Northern Ireland as it wants, with most of its soul, to be. The people have come out of a dark dungeon into the airy normality others in these islands enjoy, and their delight has been overwhelming.

They revelled in the peace, prayed for it to continue and, in most cases, began to learn the importance of their personal contribution. They saw the need to coexist, and sustain mutual respect by means of silence no con sensual euphoria, but an understanding, after 25 years of near war, that toleration did not mean surrender.

This was one side of the Ulster people. The other side tribalism, suspicion and a capacity for hatred was beginning to be prudently suppressed. Economic advancement was the most tangible reward. The bad side was by no means liquidated, but the compost was being laid down in which political leaders, if so minded, could plant the seeds of a new society with the obvious the best sides of most of the people.

What happened last week looked like a grass roots uprising out of this ordure, the Prods against the Taigs and vice versa. In fact it was an appalling failure by the politicians. Of the many tests of political leadership, two are especially relevant to the condition of Northern Ireland. Does the leader seek to bring out the best in the people, or gratify the worst?

And is the leader true to the supreme task of his calling, the one thing nobody else can do, which is to persuade people to follow a course of action they may not at first agree with? Is the leader a persuader for the highest factor of attainable good, or for the lowest denominator of age old evil?

David Trimble has quickly proved a disastrous leader of the Ulster Unionists. The disaster is the greater because he gives the impression of being a modern man, capable of speaking the kind of language that reaches beyond the steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone.

Last week the proportion of time Mr Trimble was prepared to allocate to cultivating the good as opposed to the bad instincts of the people who look up to him reflected badly on his judgment. He seemed scarcely to be trying to defuse the tribalism of the Orange marchers, and his fellow democrat, the Rev Martin Smyth, leader of the Orange Order, was worse.

Many of the marchers were, for sure, lovers of the two year peace. There were probably many who might not have marched at all, certainly not at Drumcree, but were ready to answer the summons of their democratic leaders to man the barricades.

Charitably, one might say these leaders succumbed to mob rule with the same abject helplessness as did the Royal Ulster Constabulary. More realistically, one might say they helped to urge it on.

Either way, they were a disgrace to the constitutional democracy they sit in the House of Commons to uphold a default that was treated with remarkably supine and negligent silence by the House on Monday, when it met to hear the Northern Ireland Secretary report.

There are times when it makes sense to keep Trimble and his party sweet. The week after their direct complicity in the overturning of law and order in our land is not one of them.

But they weren't alone in gratifying the baser instincts. Churchmen have the highest duty to avoid capitulation to them, as well as the least need to appeal to voters by indulging in it.

Something drove Cardinal Cahal Daly to break this rule, and make remarks about what happened that can only have had a effect on any Catholic's who hear them. Speaking from his eminence, the cardinal laid blame exclusively on the British government. His tenor as indistinguishable from that of Gerry Adams, and John Bruton was no better.

That is not the cardinal's normal pitch. He has a heroic record as a doer of attempted good over the entire 27 year period of Ulster's present trouble. But his statement now could have been designed to legitimise the worst instincts of the nationalist community at the very time when he should have found words, despite the extremity of what happened, to counsel against them.

There was a third political failure.

The Northern Ireland state, in the person of the Chief Constable, made grave error of judgment. His intelligence about the Orange Order and its intentions was, as he admitted, deficient. The lawlessness of the Rev myth and his friends was something he didn't count on.

And according to the present decision on the march, both and to stop it was his call.

Sir Patrick insisted on that on Monday, and there's no reason to doubt that the decision was a police and not a political decision.

Contemplating the ensuing catastrophe, however, many people will be bound to ask why. This demarcation line seems sensible in England's Home Counties, less so when the constitution itself, and the very future of a process the government has invested immensely in advancing, is at risk.

FOR Viceroy Mayhew to have stood aside while terror was so suddenly unleashed upon the land was an act of delegation too far, not adequately justified by his post facto defence of every decision the Chief Constable took.

The peace, it is now clearer than ever, owed more to the people than the politicians. It could have been wrecked by the IRA, and one shouldn't take all credit from both London and Dublin for their efforts to sustain it.

But the change that peace brought to the behaviour and expectations of Ulster people turns out not to have happened to their so called leaders. Faced with a real test, they failed it. They sank back into the style that has brought nothing but futility to Northern Ireland in the entire life time of all those who habitually deploy it.

The talks, one must hope, will still lead somewhere. They must certainly be attempted. If the mass of the people could have their way, some concessions for peace would be worth making on every side. They've tasted what it might be like. But Gerry Adams cannot bear the thought. And neither can David Trimble.