While everyone else is preparing for referendums on the future of the island next month, one man in Belfast is planning his own plebiscite on Northern Ireland's most bitter single issue.
Vincent McKenna, a former IRA man who is now a political student, intends to hold a poll on Belfast's Ormeau Road in late May or early June to give local people a say on whether non-sectarian Orange and Apprentice Boys parades should be allowed to cover the full length of the city's most contentious route.
The poll will not decide the issue one way or another, but if it comes off it will be McKenna's latest attempt to inject some degree of democracy into an argument he believes has been hijacked by Sinn Fein for short-term political gain.
He is already responsible for a contentious survey of the area last month which suggested a high level of local support for parades, but which was rubbished by the Lower Ormeau Concerned Citizens (LOCC) group. McKenna's methodology was also questioned by the head of the politics department at Queen's University, who subsequently wrote to the LOCC distancing the college from the survey. But, more seriously, McKenna believes his efforts - and recent public comments on IRA tactics - have also earned him a death threat from his former colleagues in the movement, conveyed to him via relatives in the Republic by what he says is a senior figure in the organisation. The threat was condemned by Queens academics in a letter to this newspaper last week, and McKenna insists he is undeterred by it.
His attitude to the parades issue stems from a number of sources, one of which is simple self-preservation. He lives off the Upper Ormeau Road, a mixed area through which all the marches pass. And Catholics there have suffered a backlash from the refusal of those north of the Ormeau bridge to accept parades of any kind, he says.
"They turn back here and see my house and say, `there's a McKenna living there, he'll do.' But the LOCC don't want to know about our problems." Another part of his argument is that the Protestant community of the Upper Ormeau is already declining in the face of a dynamic young Catholic population, and feels further "hammered" by developments like the forced rerouting of marches.
But, most of all, he thinks Sinn Fein have cynically used the parades question to "secure and expand" their power bases, at the cost of increased sectarian tension. "They needed an issue in 1995. They'd lost Border roads, they'd lost demilitarisation, so they hit on parades. As one of them said to me, `it was staring us in the face'. And it's working for them".
It's not that McKenna doesn't understand the nationalist dislike of parades. In Aughnacloy, the "hateful wee town" in Tyrone where he grew up, Orange bands traditionally taunted the 30 per cent Catholic minority on July 12th, stopping outside the McKenna home among others and turning up the volume.
Nor is he an apologist for the "sectarian filth" who during a 1992 march on the Lower Ormeau danced and gave five-finger salutes outside the Sean Graham bookmaker's shop where five Catholics had been murdered two months earlier.
In fact, his conviction about the rights of marchers is a vestige of the republican beliefs he used to espouse. He says the leaders of the opposition to the Ormeau Road marches object to the sectarian trappings but privately admit they want no loyal order parades of any kind, and he "simply cannot understand" that. "I just think if we're going to have a real peace process the marches have to go down the road."
To this end, he intends to ask those living within the route's catchment area two questions - whether they oppose marches of any kind, and whether they would support marches with no sectarian music or other unacceptable trappings. He plans to have four polling "booths" at different points of the route but accepts that some form of independent monitoring will be necessary for the exercise to work. Funding is another question yet to be tackled.
An LOCC spokesman, Gerard Rice, questions McKenna's ability to hold a proper poll, and points to a 1995 Coopers and Lybrand survey of the Lower Ormeau which showed 95 per cent wanted parades rerouted away from the area. Until the marchers "sit down and talk" with community representatives, he says, this is unlikely to change.
The group gave an unenthusiastic welcome to the Parades Commission ruling preventing the Easter Monday Apprentice Boys' parade from crossing Ormeau Bridge. But Gerard Rice is even less enthusiastic about the commission's declared belief that the ground should be prepared for at least one march on the full route later this year. "The commission has eight guidelines for deciding on marches and only under one of them - tradition - could they justify a march going through Lower Ormeau in present conditions."
Vincent McKenna has written to Gerry Adams and other Sinn Fein leaders, asking them to "step back from the sectarian agenda" of opposition to marches. He says some people in Sinn Fein are uncomfortable with the party's stance, and suspects there might be some veiled criticism of it at this weekend's ardfheis.
"When I was a member of the republican family - and leaving aside the military struggle, which I know might be hypocritical - I believed we had a radical agenda and policies we could have sold to anyone. But republicanism in Ireland now is like Communism in Russia. It's become a dirty word."