The annual saga of attacks on homes, churches and schools, of protests against marches, riots across "peacelines" and against police is probably the story from the North that most repels the South and indeed the few in Britain who notice, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
Some Catholic families isolated in largely Protestant towns and villages face intimidation at various levels throughout the year. The pattern is over two centuries old. A considerable number make no official complaint, for various reasons and the strain they suffer becomes known, if at all, only inside their wider family.
It also happens to Protestants, but police and housing authorities confirm, year after year, that the bulk of those forced to move house are Catholic. This is a contentious statement, no matter how substantiated.
The IRA responsibility for almost half the dead of the Troubles will always cast a huge shadow over any recommendation of sympathy for Northern Catholics. To some in today's Republic, any account of intimidation which does not immediately add that Protestants are equally mistreated equates to rewriting "the conflict," mere Sinn Féin propaganda.
Now the Troubles are supposed to be over, many in the North who live in comfortable middle-class districts or solidly segregated countryside, Catholics and Protestants alike, are allergic to reports of attacks, graffiti and posters that overnight mark out individuals or demarcate territory afresh. Some in the largest Catholic districts are not that sympathetic to their co-religionists in Ahoghill, Ballymena. What kind of Catholic would choose to be so outnumbered, they ask? Why not opt to be among "your own"? If anything at all is new this year, it is the outspokenness of clergymen both Protestant and Catholic. The leaders of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches have visited schools which have been attacked, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Connor won a standing ovation from a Ballymena Catholic congregation. Many others have sent messages of support.
UDA pipe-bombings of Catholic homes and property several years ago that went on for months brought nothing like the sustained solidarity of recent days. Picketing directed at Saturday night's Mass-goers that began nine years ago outside Ballymena's Harryville chapel sparked protests and sympathy from brave local Protestants, clerical and lay, but never visits and statements from church leaders on this summer's scale. There was no gesture as vivid as the sight recently of Ballymena Protestants on their knees scrubbing the Harryville chapel steps, stained with paint yet again. Nor have Catholic clerics weighed in with anything like the strength of a broadcast this week by a Ballymena priest, Fr John Burns. This became a direct rebuke to the current Presbyterian Moderator, Dr Uprichard, whose church is in Ahoghill, scene of the most intense intimidation - for allegedly failing to give a lead to his flock and for a theology deficient in real Christianity. From the conservative wing of the church, Dr Uprichard made clear when taking up the moderatorship that "in conscience" he cannot worship with Catholics. But on return from holiday last weekend, he issued a statement of distress at "the good name of Ahoghill being maligned", condemned the attacks as "wrong and sinful" and has since made visits to Catholic schools. Clearly alive to inter-denominational differences, Bishop Alan Harper said as he visited Ballymena churches that it did not require any surrender of principle to stand together.
Fundamentalist Protestantism has always openly abominated Catholic theology, liturgy, faith and practice, but the Northern Ireland traffic has been one way for a long time. The last Pope proclaimed other Christian denominations inferior: northern priests who share Rome's disdain have for decades kept those feelings in-house. For the most part they have also been loath to go public about attacks on Catholics: some still believe complaint will bring more abuse. This is more than an echo of pre-Troubles conditioning; the old mentality of keeping your head down, turning away wrath by being as invisible as possible.
Sinn Féin enjoy pointing up anti-Catholic bigotry. But nationalist politicians, Sinn Féin as well as the SDLP, have difficulties in responding to sustained attacks on Catholics. For the SDLP to call policing inadequate invites criticism of the party's decision to back the police service. Lambast the police if you are Sinn Féin and you raise the bar the party must soon cross to support all the institutions of the state - or further postpone power-sharing.
The summer attacks depress many, and will do nothing to lessen the aversion to Northern Ireland among outsiders. Yet there may be a lasting, useful, sense of born-again Catholic clerical outspokenness and of Protestant clerical solidarity. It is not naïve to point to the very public objections now being made at unprecedented levels inside Protestantism as something heartening - a sign perhaps, for Christians so divided, that the spirit of the Samaritan is still alive.