"I HATE it. I hate what we've seen over the past few days. But I have to tell you I think it was necessary."
That was the verdict - stark, and unconditional - of one senior Ulster Unionist MP yesterday, as politicians and public alike pondered the implications of the Orange Order's victory at drumcree.
Ministers and church leaders will disdain talk of victories and defeats. But neither community - in Portadown or throughout Northern Ireland - will have any difficulty divining who won and who lost.
In Portadown yesterday, Mr David Trimble affirmed there had been no compromise - while offering no assurance that the affair would not be re- enacted in 12 months.
At Westminster, meanwhile, John Hume, Seamus Mallon and Kevin McNamara were spitting blood. The SDLP's deputy leader demanded to know how people could confidently negotiate with a government which did not keep its word. And Labour's former Northern Ireland spokesman taunted Michael Heseltine with the charge that it was 'the Orange writ' and not the Queen's writ which ran in Northern Ireland.
The unionist MP quoted above doubtless enjoyed that. He was certain the Orangemen would walk down Garvaghy Road. That was the imperative outcome of the necessary stand-off. And he drew no distinction of substance between the orderly protests organised by the Orange Order and the violence which came in their wake. The politician accepted the reality that one was always going to follow the other.
So was he sanguine - about the burning of cars, homes and businesses? About Catholics forced to flee their homes? About the verbal and physical assaults on members of the RUC? Or about the image of loyalism projected across Britain and around the world?
THE emphatic answer was that he was not. But the second Drumcree Siege had been necessary. Why? "Because we've been double-crossed and lied to time and again," came the reply.
And there you have it in a nutshell - the rationale by which many unionists will shrug off the seeming contradictions of the past week; the damage done to their own and the wider community; the injury inflicted on their own cause before an appalled and uncomprehending outside world, which sees only the assertion of sectarian ascendancy
To many observers it at first seemed inconceivable that the collective unionist leadership would stake so much on the right to march down Garvaghy Road. By its own terms, unionism has suffered serious reverses since the beginning of the "peace process". Yet there has been no violent response - thanks primarily to the sophisticated judgments made by the "loyalist" parties. And the Ulster Unionists had appeared sanguine enough when faced with the Downing Street Declaration and the Joint Framework Documents.
Moreover, the political circumstances seemed propitious, viewed from the unionist perspective. The resumed IRA campaign inclined British sympathies once more toward the unionists. The pan-nationalist consensus was fractured, and the Taoiseach's own personal distrust of republican intentions was amply confirmed by the murder of Garda McCabe. After the Manchester bombing, many - not least on the Irish side - saw the potential for Mr Trimble to re-write the political agenda by opening a dynamic dialogue with, Mr Bruton.
However, that was probably all fantasy, and we should certainly have seen this week's confrontation coming. That we didn't owes something to the good-news-manufacturing and wishful thinking which has accompanied the "peace process".
OR the most laudable reasons, most of us have been prepared to travel hopefully - turning a blind eye to the many contradictions inherent in a peace predicated on the conflicting, assumptions of loyalist and republican victory.
However, the warning signs were there - long, even, before the collapse of the IRA ceasefire. And among the most conspicuous was Mr Trimble's election as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party.
It was swiftly forgotten that Mr (now Sir James) Molyneaux was forced into early retirement because he was deemed too soft in his dealings with the British government. Mr Trimble - helped by last year's battle of Drumcree - won the leadership and a mandate to be a good deal less trusting or accommodating. By any objective assessment (and it was one shared within the UUP) Mr Trimble's succession marked a significant movement to the right.
Yet, the new unionist leader won plaudits for a dramatic change of style and approach. His friends in the Tory press hailed the arrival of a unionist moderniser. And hope sprang, as ever, in Dublin. British ministers too comforted themselves with the notion that Mr Trimble - able and ambitious - would not be content to languish on the backbenches at Westminster. In crude terms, they suggested his "desire" to be prime minister or chief executive in a devolved government made him the man to do the deal!
Mr Trimble offered no public evidence to, support such optimism. Far from it. His defined agenda suggested no significant variation on the broadly "integrationist" approach pursued faithfully by Mr Molyneaux over many years. He was elected on the promise to hold the line more firmly - not to cross it. And, ironically, a perceived miscalculation on his part was to strengthen the anti-UUP tide which activists had feared during the fin months of Mr Molyneaux's reign.
When John Major finally granted Mr Trimble's demand for election as a vehicle to negotiation, London obviously hoped the new unionist leader would win a substantial mandate - and with it greater flexibility. The result was the opposite. The May 30th poll dramatically revealed the scale of unionist fragmentation. And that - together with the psychology evidenced in Portadown this week - is the real analogy with 1974.
Then, as now, unionists saw the Anglo-Irish design as an incremental road to Irish unity. And despite all their attempts to preserve a parliamentary understanding with Mr Major, that unionist MP confirms - unconsciously perhaps - that distrust of British intentions is once again the prevailing unionist sentiment.
Little, in reality, has changed. The actions and studied ambiguities of republicans, and the reactions - and calculations of the unionists, appear to confirm the sceptical view that the peace process for many on each side was in fact, a power play.
Significant Dublin players always acknowledged that their "pitch to the extremes" was a risky gamble. They will take no comfort from the confirmation of their underlying thesis - that neither is a political settlement in the North forthcoming from the centre.