Suppose the provisions of the Good Friday agreement come into effect. They will eventually mean that each little citizen born in Northern Ireland will have reason to believe that his or her heritage and identity is respected by that jurisdiction. But that doesn't have much to do with opportunity, or with the sharing out of privilege.
Northern Catholics have a much improved chance of self-respect in the Northern society to come. But access to the real levers of local power is a different matter entirely. And hoping for a welcome at every level of society - experiencing parity of esteem in ordinary, everyday life, so to speak - is another.
These thoughts might occur to anyone who takes a trip to one of the strangest places in Belfast. It is Bloomfield Road, in the heart of loyalist east Belfast. The milieu is quintessential working-class Belfast. Terraces of little red-brick row houses. Murals of King Billy. "UDA Release The Prisoners" stencilled on the walls.
And there in the middle, in a dull little street, are suddenly four or five extremely upmarket ladies' boutiques. Gucci. Georges Rech. Dior. Between them are coffee-shops where the ladies presumably have a snack (chicken olives, lasagna, soup with wheaten bread) between shopping bouts. The street is lined with wives' cars: RangeRovers, Audis, Mercs. At coffee time in the morning you can't get parking.
"This is Belfast's Rodeo Drive", I was told. Which seems so strange, among the Coronation Street houses, beside a church that proclaims: "Life is not without its storms but the Christian is never without their Saviour". Why is it to this street that the rich ladies come? Belfast is full of such puzzles for outsiders. Someone told me it is because the good grammar schools are nearby. The wheaten bread is not the only clue that this is not Beverly Hills. These Northern women have jobs as wives and mothers. If they dress extremely expensively it is because their husbands have a lot of money, and proclaiming that they have a lot of money is part of the job.
I don't suppose they're independently rich. The trophies they are claiming are for the institutions they represent, not for themselves. It is not bimbos you see picking up their rewards in the Bloomfield Road boutiques, but seasoned matrons.
They wouldn't dream of living in this area, of course. They live in Holywood and Bangor and so on, in spotless houses with Poggenpohl kitchens. (The local expensive "lifestyle" magazines have pine kitchens in profusion, but never a hint of sex.)
These women might hardly venture into the city at all, but for the schools. Because the centre of Belfast has too many poor people in it who, poor as they are, manage to divide on sectarian lines, with shoppers from east Belfast patronising the east side of Royal Avenue and shoppers from the Falls Road the other side. The Castlecourt shopping complex is for everyone, but it can hardly be called glamorous. There are no indigenous department stores like Arnotts or Clerys, much less anything like Brown Thomas, which even if you can't afford to shop in you're more than welcome to walk around. Marks and Spencer's beige machine-washable trousers are par, in many ways, for the course.
We think of shopping as the essentially democratic act. If you have the money, you're as good as the next person. But it's slightly different in Belfast. Even on the Lisburn Road, where there is a further enclave of very expensive designer boutiques, many of the dragon-ladies who run the places keep the shop-door locked. You ring the bell, and the woman decides whether you look as if you belong or not. Shoppers who use the boutiques, in short, are already known.
Obviously, faith in the city centre was lost during the bad times. But there's more to it than that. A city - a really urban, rather than rural, space - is characterised by anonymity and by sharing. But Northern Irish society is knowing and watchful, and people want to stay among their own, and what they have they'll share with their like, but not with anyone else.
In a normal society wealth has a myriad ways of flaunting itself. The Belfast establishment (including its tiny minority of Catholics) is bursting with the wealth that in other cultures is ostentatiously expressed in style and luxury and careless consumption. But that is not consonant, in the mental world called "Ulster", with the self-image of a hard-working, thrifty, morally superior and above all embattled people.
So they may buy £2,000 outfits as a matter of course, but an unwritten rule says all the accessories will have to match, to prove that though you're rich you're not wild.
How can you get into an establishment if you have to already be in to get in? That's one question. All the evidence so far is that it's where the Catholics who make it do want to be, in with the rulers. And is it worth getting into? That's another.
If the new political arrangements empower a new class, if through initiatives like the "educational campus" announced for West Belfast last week they really do offer a path to privilege to new people, then I hope new ways of displaying privilege will be found.
Because a keen student of these things told me the following anecdote, and I'm still struck by it. Every evening, rich young Belfast men park their Porsches and Ferraris outside certain trendy pubs straight after work. Then they go home in a taxi. Towards closing-time they take a taxi back to the pub, have a mineral water, and leave with all the others, casually waving their alarm-zappers at their sports-cars as they leave. The point is for their cars to be up at the front, not lost down the car-park. The point is for the cars to be seen without their owners ever being accused of going out of their way to show them.
The biggest, saddest laugh I had last week was when a very privileged unionist said to me that he feared for the future of Northern Irish society now, and he thought he'd send his children to college in Scotland, "because after all these agreements I'm afraid that this place is not going to be a meritocracy". In other words, he's afraid the Catholics are going to take the jobs and the money.
What I couldn't get over was his perfectly innocent belief that it is a meritocracy now. Did merit earn the sports-cars and the Sonia Rykiel suits and the oak-and-stainless-steel kitchens? Or has there been - as there always has in the Republic - inherited privilege? Based on peer-group advantage, and in no way denoting moral or commercial superiority?
The difference is that that class in the Republic hasn't been able to define the people outside it as dissidents. And, of course, the rich here spend their money where the rest of us can see them doing it.