AS EVER, when the cesspit of centuries of blind bigotry in Ulster comes annually to the boil at the so-called marching season, the reaction of neutral observers is one of appalled perplexity.

Just what motivates these people to hate so ardently?

For is that not all that these ridiculous, beef-faced, bowler-hatted, sashed Orangemen are about as they tramp to the sound of fife and drum - asserting their supposed Protestant superiority over the Catholic minority and hating them for daring to seek equality?

And yet, in a Britain on the brink of the new millennium we see, in the backwoods enclaves of Ulster where the kind of reason and tolerance taken for granted elsewhere is determinedly denied, men still proud to march in order to maintain such oppression.

They are, of course, fools - and dangerous ones, too, as they whip up their riotous mobs.

For they believe they can restore Ulster to the unjust past that is resolutely being swept aside.

They try to ignore this.

They seek to ignore the ballot-box verdict of Ulster's majority who are determined to progress into true democracy and a fair society.

They would jeopardise the hopes of peace built around this new order and would pull down the new and fragile structures designed to advance and accommodate it.

They forget, too, that the ban on the Orange march at Portadown - where, after a night of rioting by Loyalist mobs across Ulster, a tense "No surrender" stand-off was today being staged - is one imposed by a legitimate body instituted under the Queen's law by her parliament.

Thus, we see what they believe in - defiance of reason, democracy, justice and the law.

They are throwbacks trying to put the clock back.

And though they and their poisonous attitude may be slow to expire and may rock the peace process in Ulster, their time is up.

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