The current vogue in some circles in Northern Ireland is to boost the political influence of civil society at the expense of elected representatives. The notion finds its expression in the Belfast Agreement with the proposal for a civic forum. The idea was ruthlessly pursued in the negotiations by the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition.
Many suspected its principle virtue was to act as a convalescent home for those participants unelectable by any fair voting system. As it turned out, only the UDP and the Labour Coalition failed to find seats in the Assembly.
The civic forum, in principle, is as much a part of the Belfast Agreement as the other new institutions, the prisoner releases and decommissioning. Doubts persist, however - and not only in unionist political coteries - about the merits of injecting an undemocratic element into the new dispensation. The advocates of a civic forum, when pressed to reveal who they envisage serving on such a body, dwell on the advantages of having the community and voluntary sector and the business community involved.
Many of those politicians who plied their trade during the worst of the Troubles understandably feel apprehensive about creating a bolthole for groups fronted by exterrorists - who caused most of the problems - and those who saw no profit in political involvement and refused to infuse the sectarian dogfights of the 1970s and 1980s with a moderating business outlook.
This is perhaps a malign view which is unfair to many in the community and voluntary sector and which underestimates the barriers to political activity. But taking a broader angle on civil society is no more encouraging.
Three of our largest voluntary associations have hardly covered themselves in glory over recent weeks and months. Rather, in contrast to Northern Ireland's politicians, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, the Gaelic Athletic Association and elements in the Orange Order have remained resolutely aloof from the tendency towards compromise and self-examination.
The Catholic Church's new policy document on Holy Communion, One Bread, One Body, had been in preparation for two years. It would have been better if it had not seen the light of day. If this statement of belief "breaks new ground" as was claimed at its Dublin launch, one shudders to imagine what a restatement of traditional teaching would have contained. Apparently, for non-Catholics to receive the Eucharist in a Catholic church it must be on the understanding that this is on an "unrepeatable" occasion.
In what appears to be a repetition of the view of Protestants as heretics and Protestant communion as a sham, "the Catholic Church claims, in all humility, to be endowed with all the gifts with which God wishes to endow his Church . . . the entirety of revealed truth . . . is found within the Catholic Communion of the Church" and that the Catholic Church is "uniquely gifted".
Do mixed-religion couples feel "in all humility" that they face "an obstacle to the full unity of family life" which is not of the Catholic Hierarchy's own making?
The Republic's President, Mary McAleese, might not be a unionist pin-up but she is to be warmly applauded for so ostentatiously challenging the doctrine of her own church last December. First Minister David Trimble was movingly applauded for disconcerting Orange hardliners by attending the Requiem Mass for the three children from Buncrana murdered in Omagh in August, but what if he had approached the Communion rail? Would Seamus Mallon, a Catholic, be publicly rebuked if he were to take Communion with David Trimble, a Presbyterian, in an Anglican church?
Sadly, the Catholic Hierarchy in a seemingly deliberate effort not to be popular has called into question the value of pursuing ecumenical dialogue any further. All churches claim to have a better understanding of Christian truth than others, but even Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterians do not claim the route map to salvation is in their exclusive possession. Thankfully, many individual Catholics are prepared to be guided by the Holy Spirit on this question as on contraception and Ne Temere rather than a reactionary church leadership.
The winds of change blow but faintly through the GAA also. The GAA board's decision to refuse permission for the pitch in Omagh to be used for a cross-community football match to raise funds for the Omagh Appeal Fund and to make an exception from its rules banning "foreign games" has flabbergasted many within and without the GAA fraternity. It reinforces the view of the most obscurantist and unreconstructed republicans that unionists constitute foreigners. All the blood on the streets of Omagh was the same colour.
Likewise, the refusal to lift the ban on serving members of the security services from playing Gaelic games until the RUC has been reformed and the barracks in Crossmaglen dismantled while denying the GAA is a political body produces only mirth in non-republican company.
The GAA is unwittingly giving aid and comfort to those who - wrongly - view the GAA as "the IRA at play" and believe club officials are legitimate targets. How can the RUC more accurately reflect the community it serves when the primary social organisation in the Catholic community ostracises those Catholics who think that a police career is a noble pursuit?
Unthinking intransigence and bigotry are not confined to Catholics, of course. Most decent Orangemen and unionists have been left speechless by the comment of the Portadown Orange Order's spokesman on the murder of a Catholic policeman by loyalists in the town that "the cost of civil liberties can be very high". Until the cancerous Spirit of Drumcree group is cut out of the Order, the whole institution will continue to feel the consequences in terms of low public esteem and not just in republican ghettos. The Rev William Bingham's honourable way out of the Drumcree impasse after the murder of the Quinn children has not been followed up, nor has Grand Master Robert Saulters's suggestion of a conference with nationalist residents' groups to find a comprehensive solution to the marching problem. Nor has the Apprentice Boys' success at disarming the Bogside residents' group by engaging in dialogue via the Shared City Forum in Londonderry been adopted. Deliverance is not going to see Orange feet on the Garvaghy Road.
Mass civil society in Northern Ireland lacks civility. But then, after all, perhaps the civic forum was only meant to be a plaything of Belfast 9, Northern Ireland's equivalent of Dublin 4.