Orangemen in Belfast keep their promise and the peace

All quiet in Shaftesbury Square, said the RUC officer happily as night descended on the hub of Belfast city. "Well, OK, it does look a bomb has hit it," he conceded as an afterthought. It did. It resembled a place that had been carpet-bombed.

But the only danger to life and limb as the glorious Twelfth drew to a close was from the shards of beer bottles shooting from under the tyres of passing cars. As the last stragglers struggled home, the city centre was buried beneath bottles, glass, fried chicken and beer can cartons, blue-and-white plastic bags - and beer kegs and chairs. "Ah, sure, it's the one day in the year," said the RUC man indulgently, "and if you're around at dawn come morning, wee fellas will be out sweepin' and cleanin' and there won't be a scrap left on these streets."

Around us, a couple was pulling a drunk out of a doorway, beseeching him to come home. A terrible caterwauling emanated from a football supporters' club where someone was wailing "It's now or never" and fans called greetings from an upstairs window.

Two young fellows tottered across the street wearing police traffic cones on their heads. "Go talk to the coneheads and get the cones back," said the police officer to his men.

The only cross words came from a drunken woman weaving from one side of the street to the other. The only job left for the officers was to remove the beer kegs and the chairs and to pray for more glorious Twelfths like this one. "They can do it when they want to," said one.

If the day had a keynote, that was it. A quiet desperation on the part of the Orangemen to prove they could keep a promise and the peace; a sense of resignation from the other side that if they could do it on a day like this, they could have done it all along.

The Orangemen had set the tone for the day with a show of ruthless discipline in the morning on the Ormeau Bridge. All one of them had to do was merely raise a voice, demanding their traditional route back, and within seconds he was being manhandled out of the parade party, being separated from his collarette and being bundled back down towards Ballynafeigh with the promise that he'd never walk again (in the parade sense, one assumes).

The result was evident all over Belfast last night.

People talked about having seen a glimmer of those legendary days when the Twelfth really was about spectacle and fiesta and its participants did nothing more lawless than litter the streets. A sultry, happy, relaxed city having a few drinks, teasing RUC men, belting out terrible but non-sectarian music and suddenly alert to the notion that a national holiday can be simply that.