SUMMER approaches and the annual sterile debate about the Orange marching season is starting already. Or is it simply ritualised sectarian abuse?
If on July 12th you find yourself in a field full of Orangemen in, say, rural Armagh, it may seem like the former. There (apart from a bit of ugliness in Portadown on the way, or on the way back, or both) it is largely a simple day out with decent folk, who react with friendly curiosity to a southern accent.
It will seem less pleasant if, instead you choose that day to stand on a street in Belfast, in an atmosphere of menace surrounded by beer swilling youths as the swaggering, Pope kicking bands march past.
April is a little early for all this. Soon we will hear the annual piece of punditry explaining that it is unrealistic to expect political progress at such a time of heightened tension, and we can all forget about any movement until September. Whatever the marching season is, it is not a harmless ritual.
One wonders what the late Ron Brown, the US Commerce Secretary who died in a plane crash with 34 others in Croatia last week, made of it all. His job brought him to the North, to Bosnia and South Africa, in recent years, as part of the Clinton administration's efforts to promote peace and stability.
For Brown, and for the US administration, the annual Drumcrees and Ormeau Roads were not the point. They were in the business of conflict resolution through creating jobs.
In Bosnia, South Africa, the Middle East and Northern Ireland, if you give people work, some money, an ability to save a little and to take a holiday, they'll be less inclined to disrupt a society in which they have an economic stake. That's the theory.
At the memorial service for Ron Brown last Wednesday in St Patrick's Cathedral, this theory was spelt out by US Senator Chris Dodd.
Mr Brown had been in Ireland and Bosnia to promote US business, but "Ron Brown understood that these trips were about far more than promoting business. He knew that after the peace treaties were signed and the guns laid to rest, the possibility of a truly lasting peace depended on each person having the same opportunity to realise their dreams of a better tomorrow.
"He sought to heal the lingering anguish and ethnic violence with the promise of brighter opportunities."
THE Taoiseach took up this theme: "Ron Brown saw business not just as a means to producing more things, but as a means of coming to depend on others to a greater extent."
Mutual dependence would help dissolve conflict. Transform the big issue of jobs and prosperity, the theory goes, and the Ormeau bridges will resolve themselves.
"We must have more and better jobs", President Clinton told the Washington investment conference last May. "That is the way to pre empt fanaticism. That is the way to close the book on old and bloody conflicts."
This "jobs and prosperity first, lasting peace later" philosophy is now being tested in several of the world's long standing regions of conflict.
The Israeli government, for example, has indicated that it will consider handing back the Golan Heights to Syria, but only if the two states can agree cross border economic projects, water and electricity schemes. The Israelis call it a "warm peace"; the idea being that if the peoples of the region depend on each other, they cannot afford to go to war with each other again.
In 1951, the same principle inspired the founders of the European Coal and Steel Community. If the coal and steel industries of France and Germany could be made interdependent, future war would be, in Robert Schumann's words, "not only unthinkable, but materially impossible the world tour, it is evident that South Africa has worked, so far, not just because of inspired political leadership but economic self interest.
The white population saw that democracy was the only option if they were to preserve their economic well being in the face of international economic pressure. Non whites saw that the abandonment of the ANC's Marxist economic dogma and the sharing of power with the minority whites could retain foreign economic investment and bring a share of the benefits for themselves.
Continued stability in South Africa is seen as dependent on the government's ability to deliver housing, water, and material well being to the people in sufficient quantities. So far, political morality has coincided nicely with business and economic self interest.
In Northern Ireland, the case is not proven, because in spite of the two investment conferences, Mr Brown's efforts and the major US engagement, jobs have been slow to arrive. But the North's Industrial Development Board (IDB) and an investor can spend over two years discussing a project before it arrives.
The IDB reports an increase of 75 per cent in the numbers of potential investors visiting Northern Ireland. Two weeks ago, a Korean company announced an investment and 300 jobs for west Belfast.
There are reports this week that the US company, S.G. Wilson, is to set up in west Belfast, creating a further 500 jobs. Increased prosperity in tourism and related industries is visible to the naked eye.
Chuck Meissner, the US assistant secretary of Commerce for International Economic Policy, who also died in the plane crash, had paid four visits to Northern Ireland this year. Another was planned for May, and he was to lead a trade mission in June.
Last October he brought 40 business people to Northern Ireland. He organised last year's major Northern Ireland investment conferences in Washington and Belfast.
THERE are signs, therefore, that the ceasefires will bring a peace dividend".
The question is will that peace dividend copper fasten the peace?
The relative prosperity of former Yugoslavia did not prevent the descent into carnage there. But the resulting crippling of the Serbian economy was a major factor in the ending of the war. Now, just as in Ireland, efforts are being made to bring investment to the region to encourage the peace.
I see it all as a cynical move to keep the world safe for US multinational capital is unfair. In the long term, a stable Balkan region, Ireland and southern Africa will benefit international trade, but the US Commerce Secretary, the assistant US Commerce Secretary and a planeload of US officials and business people didn't travel to Bosnia simply for profits. The profits to be made in Sarajevo are pretty small beer these days.
As the tributes were paid to. Brown and his colleagues last week, Belfast was recovering from its latest burst of violence. You could watch the nasty squabbles on Ormeau Bridge and think nothing had changed. Or you could take the view of Ron Brown and Chuck Meissner and reason that, if you change the big picture, the smaller details will change, too.
This American attitude was seen at Dayton, Ohio, when the US brought some of the world's most difficult customers together to broker a peace ideal for Bosnia. Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian government leaders argued furiously over where the lines on the map would be drawn.
The discussions on the rights and wrongs of centuries past was cut short when the Americans reportedly brought in computer equipment from NASA, cajoled and pressurised the protagonists and got the lines drawn.
Then they moved on to the next business - what Chuck Meissner used to call "sustaining peace through commercial diplomacy". The crudity of the line drawing will become less important as people feel the economic benefits of peace, they reasoned.
The strategy will continue under the present administration, but to work, it must continue well beyond. A new Republican administration might not invest the same level of political will in solving faraway conflicts. And as Chris Dodd warned in yesterday's Irish Times, if the IRA returns to full scale violence "it will be a long time again before an American president will even come near this issue".
Can jobs distract people from deep rooted feelings of national grievance? "Getting a job will not change your fundamental political views," says one Northerner who worked with Meissner. "But it will give you hope and a stake in your society, and that will make you think more rationally about alternative ways forward, rather than violence."