The tensions over Drumcree threaten to carry Northern Ireland politics back on to the streets. A year after the signing of the Belfast Agreement, and perhaps days before Tony Blair makes the fateful miscalculation of pushing David Trimble into an executive with Sinn Fein without prior decommissioning, attention is once again drawn to the hill at Drumcree.
How have we arrived at this situation? David Trimble negotiated an agreement with the combined forces of pan-nationalism in the name of New Unionism. To forge New Unionism it was necessary to jettison a lot of the baggage of traditional unionism which might impede progress towards an agreement with a nationalist coalition linked together by the understanding reached during the Hume-Adams talks.
David Trimble acquiesced to the British government's demands, and entered into the negotiations on the basis of an Irish nationalist analysis and within the framework nationalism had previously outlined.
In effect, David Trimble was trapped into an agreement within very narrow confines which effectively excluded the cultural interests of his own people - not only the folk culture of Orangeism but the rising interest and demand for Ulster-Scots and Ulster's sense of "Britishness" in general.
The language of the agreement was stutteringly adopted by Trimble's unionists - "equality", "inclusivity", "accommodation", "human rights", "values" - and then repeated with a total lack of comprehension and confidence.
Nationalists and British New Labour ministers knew what they were talking about but unionists did not. And no wonder: the linguistic shift signalled an abandonment of Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the adoption of a European impetus provided by the French Revolution 100 years later, with its commitment to the Enlightenment and human rights.
Along with the notion of "Protestant Ulster", God is no longer sovereign in Stormont. The subtleties and significance of such change pass most people by.
Equality, inclusivity, accommodation and human rights were all part and parcel of a new cultural agenda aimed at transforming Northern Ireland society. However, these changes excluded the longstanding pro-British cultural forms of the people who had voted Mr Trimble into the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party and into political office.
NOW the resentment, insecurity and alienation symbolised by Mr Trimble's own constituency of Portadown is increasingly finding an outlet in the dangerous politics of the street.
All attention is focused on Drumcree and the Garvaghy Road - a standoff no one can win because the issue is too narrowly focused, denying everyone room to manoeuvre.
If we really are in the business of creating a stable society in Northern Ireland in which complexity and diversity are tolerated and accepted, then the impasse on the Garvaghy Road has to give way to the much bigger picture, accepting that those who value their British cultural forms of the Protestant Reformation, Ulster Scots and constitutional rights or plain old-fashioned "Britishness" have to be given their place and space. Acceptance and not rejection needs to top the agenda.
What if the alienated and insecure Protestants have been right all along? Is the Belfast Agreement simply another transitional phase in the long war to enforce a united Ireland? The human cost of the Troubles, articulated in the BBC's radio documentary Legacy, or in the emergence of so many victims' groups, or in the trauma of those awaiting the discovery of hidden bodies, warns that we can embrace either diversity or anguish.
Irish nationalists close their eyes to the fact that the great continuum in the history of this island, which was once upon a time numbered only as one among the many Western Isles, is division and not unity.
And even after paying such a high price in human suffering over the last 30 years, the stubborn resilience of variegated forms of unionism counterbalances whatever gains Irish nationalism has made on the sharpened pikes of the Provisional IRA's "cutting edge".
The difficulty for Irish nationalists is that to give space and acknowledgment to the Orangemen, to Ulster-Scots or to simple "Britishness" is to admit that the ideology of nationalism is fundamentally flawed.
It is to acknowledge the unthinkable: that everyone on the island doesn't think of himself as Irish and doesn't aspire to be Irish either. The challenge is whether nationalism can make the adjustment that comes from exchanging Celtic myth for contemporary realism.
Dr Clifford Smyth, party secretary to the Northern Ireland Unionist Party, presents the annual BBC commentary on the July 12th parade in Belfast and has written a political biography of Ian Paisley.