IT IS A DINNER-PARTY truism that September 11 marked the beginning of the end for Northern Ireland terrorism. Not only did St Patrick’s Day sentimentalists in the US see at last why it is not clever to give money to the IRA to maim civilians; but the whole of the democratic West got the message that there is a sombre new enemy against whom to unite.

Nor, in an age of suicide bombers, was it any longer possible to throw an heroic gloss over the perpetrators of Irish conflict. When we have people in our midst who are prepared not only to kill but to face certain death, it is impossible to have anything but deepened contempt for the IRA (or Loyalist) killer who scuttles off like a rat to watches the innocent burning from a safe distance. And, being bright rats, the Sinn Fein/IRA faction grasped this change of persp ective and crawled towards demilitarisation. Admittedly, it was hard to keep food down when listening to Gerry Adams’s oleaginous call for those “who have shown such commitment as volunteers of the IRA to put their undoubted talents and energy into building a new Ireland”. But it was something, even coming from a faction still mired in international crime and revenge killings.

With this promise we may have thought we had quenched this ridiculous local conflict and could turn our attention to the wider problem of murderous lunatics perverting Islam. The soft-footed government approach appeared to have borne fruits, even if they were small sour ones. It began to seem possible that we would live again in islands where children are not attacked on their way to school by aggressive bigots.

But now, for two nights, riots have defaced Ulster. Fifty police officers are hurt, some by bullets; cars and a bus were burnt out as the crowd threw petrol bombs, blast bombs, pipe bombs. A hijacked digger wrecked street lights and buildings ; businesses were ruined, fires started.

Why this revolution? Were these people who carefully hoarded bombs and guns desperate and dispossessed, homeless and starving? Were they herded into refugee camps, denied freedom of speech and worship, oppressed by a secret police, invaded by a pitiless enemy? Nope. None of the above. They just went ape because an Orange Order march got rerouted away from a Catholic area.

Any Martians starting here may now care to consult the website of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland. It is, we learn, “primarily a religious organisation . . . involved in social and charitable work that also accepts its political responsibilities”. Its parades are “glorious displays of pageantry” which follow routes “along which successive generations of Orangemen have peacefully paraded” . They are not bigots or bullies, they say, but anyone who asks them to avoid “traditional” routes is guilty of an attack on all that they believe in. Which is, basically, a local version of God plus the shade of Martin Luther.

Orangemen, rolling their pious eyes to Heaven, deny that the savagery of paramilitaries is their fault. The police, they say , were “brutal and heavy-handed”, and Sir Hugh Orde’s condemnation “inflammatory”. There was, presumably, nothing inflammatory about the bombs and guns their supporters carried; nothing brutal about a 22-month-old baby having its skull fractured or a pregnant woman being hauled from her car by hi jackers. There are weaselling attempts by the order to distance itself from its thugs’ worst misbehaviour, just as Sinn Fein for years pretended that the IRA bombers were not its fault. But even yesterday the Orange leaders would not condemn violence outright: and we have seen film of members in their sashes standing next to hooded thugs, peeling off their regalia to throw rocks. They are intertwined. They are one. The religiosity of the lodge is tied up with filth and firebombs, burnt flesh and bullets.

Read my lips, you fake Christians: no parade route is worth this, and never has been. Nor, for Sinn Fein readers, is the ambition to unite Ireland worth it. In an age of increasing pan-Europeanism that cause too grows more ridiculous by the day. Both sides are just thugs, or cheerleaders for thugs. Sinn Fein says that it is pulling back from violence; we shall know they mean it when we hear them condemn the next outrage by their men. Loyalists must do the same, and swallow their pride over march routes. Ten years of Christian meekness over such details, after all, and they might well find that in a prosperous new Ulster they could strut their old roads without anyone caring.

But they won’t do it, will they? Stiff-necked, doctrinaire, atavistic and unforgiving, they will carry on encouraging the malaise of their ignorant poor, the segregation of their children’s schools, the knee-jerk resentment, the infighting between groups on their own side. The “Loyalist Commission”, set up to wean terror groups from violence, proves useless. Equally useless is the Government’s bleat that this is about “community relations” and that “the blame game” has to stop because hey, everyone is sort-of-guilty.

Shootings, bombings and murders are crimes. They are also, in this context, blasphemy. If the Orange Order parades were really Christian, their organisers would meekly route them to avoid offending neighbours; if the “Catholic” side were Christians, they would refuse such chivalry and welcome their Protestant brothers, drums and all. So if we are having all these “tough” new laws against inciting religious hatred and backing terrorism, we may as well deploy them evenhandedly. A plague on all their wicked houses: militant mullahs and self-righteous Orangemen, video braggarts on al-Jazeera and Gerry Adams flattering mass-murderers.

There are tens of thousands of decent people trying to get on with their lives in Ulster. Government’s sole duty is to those who do not bomb or riot or encourage it. World leaders have better things to do in dangerous times than to waste time placating and featherbedding the vanity of gangsters.

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