They want to kick Trimble, not the Pope

For reasons other than the obvious ones, it would be a good idea for everyone involved in the dispute at Drumcree to visit a museum of medieval art. For the first thing that strikes you when you look at the stained-glass windows from the great Middle Ages cathedrals or at the gorgeous tapestries of the period, is that you haven't a clue what they really mean.

The colours, the patterns, the gestures, the poses, are part of an elaborate language that we know longer speak. Unless someone tells you what they signify, you simply can't make out what they are saying. Things that would have been obvious to a viewer in the last millennium are opaque now.

That's how symbols work. They require consent. Unless there is general agreement about what they signify, they remain mute. They mean whatever a broad culture thinks they mean. When consent is withdrawn, when the assumptions collapse, they return to obscurity.

Orange parades are such symbols. To anyone outside Irish culture, they seem absurd. The first British army commander in the Troubles, LieutGen Sir Ian Freeland, famously remarked on seeing his first Orange parades: "Grown men! Pathetic! Ridiculous!" Like a contemporary viewer of medieval art, he couldn't make head nor tail of them.

But the natives had long since learned to understand the symbolism. And one of the ironies of the Troubles is that Catholics and Protestants have been in broad agreement about what the parades really mean. They are symbols of Protestant triumph and Catholic humiliation. They are ritual markings of dominance and submission. To both sides, they mean "Croppies lie down!".

Oddly enough, Catholics have provided the consent without which such a meaning would be impossible. If they were not sufficiently offended, if they didn't provide the requisite response, the parades wouldn't mean very much. It's the offence, the anger, the sense of insult, that completes the circuit and creates the buzz.

The great American comedian Lenny Bruce did a routine in which he started to point out people in the audience, using the crudest ethnic epithets: "Look, there's a kike. Over here there's a mick. How come all the waiters are niggers? I can see some wops in the front row." Just before the audience started to lynch him, he explained that words are only words. They draw their power to hurt from society's agreement that they are hurtful. The way to defuse them, he suggested, was to use them all the time.

We tend to see Orange parades as something eternal and inevitable. The very term "marching season" suggests a force of nature, an aspect of the climate, like the rainy season or the dry season, that some parts of the world take for granted. But in fact the parades have often been staged to have very specific political meanings at particular times. In the 1950s, the Orangemen chose the now-forgotten Longstone Road in Co Down as their symbolic battleground. Liberal unionist ministers who tried to ban it came under massive, and successful, pressure from Protestant hardliners. In 1970 Ardoyne in Belfast was chosen as the place. Even in Portadown, in the 1980s, it was the Tunnel area rather than the Garvaghy Road that was the flashpoint.

MOST significantly, the meaning of Drumcree has been radically altered since last year. In 1995, 1996 and 1997, the conflict around Drumcree had a very clear purpose. With the "armed struggle" winding down, but with no peace agreement in sight, both sides needed the kind of proxy wars the United States and the Soviet Union conducted.

Unwilling or unable to confront each other directly, they held vicious but containable contests in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua and so on. Likewise, Drumcree was invented by the mutual consent of Sinn Fein and of hardline loyalism as a symbolic substitute for their bigger battle.

In that sense, Catholics were right to see the Orange Order's insistence on marching down Garvaghy as an attack on themselves. The primary aim of the marchers and their allies, in both the unionist parties and in Billy Wright's murder gang, was to get the right result: "Prods 1, Taigs 0".

It's not like that now. Of course, Drumcree is still about bigotry and the rituals of sectarian oneupmanship. But the purpose of the game has changed quite dramatically. It is now, first and foremost, not a conflict between Protestants and Catholics but a conflict within Protestantism. The main purpose of the showdown is not to kick the Pope or to give one in the eye to Gerry Adams and John Hume - it is to undermine David Trimble. In the process, it is also to thwart the democratic will of the people of Northern Ireland by unravelling a peace deal that 72 per cent of the electorate in Northern Ireland voted for. This time the desired scoreline is "Paisley 1, Trimble 0".

And it is, probably, the last best hope of hardline unionism. Ian Paisley and his allies didn't manage to either prevent the Belfast Agreement or propose a credible alternative. They didn't get enough support in the Assembly elections to enable them to block its implementation. They have almost no leverage with the British government.

By this time next year, cross-Border bodies, a power-sharing executive with Sinn Fein representation, decommissioning and the release of paramilitary prisoners will be (unless they can throw a spanner in the works) facts of life. This, for them, is the last battlefield on which they can hope to win.

What they need for victory, though, is Catholic consent to the meaning of the Orange marches. They need Catholics to agree that it's really all about competition between two sectarian tribes. To declare that they will not lie down. To insist that the Orangemen must negotiate with Breandan Mac Cionnaith, whom Portadown Protestants remember as "the one who blew up the Legion Hall in Thomas Steet". To forget that the main purpose of Drumcree '98 is to destroy the man whom they themselves effectively agreed to make First Minister, David Trimble.

It's open to Catholics to change the meaning of contentious Orange parades. They can see them for what they are this year - not symbols of Protestant unity against Catholicism but vehicles for a coup against the only Protestant leader who can deliver peace.

Catholics can refuse to play their assigned part in this drama; the necessary role of the enraged and insulted victims. They can, with dignity and good grace, turn their backs on the bigots, knowing that their cries of victory would then be meaningless mutterings of a dying language that will soon be incomprehensible.