AFTER the heady days of all-night negotiations over the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement and the drama of last month's referendum vote, the elections in Ulster today are perhaps taking place in a climate of anti-climax and political fatigue among voters and candidates alike.

But if nothing else, the dissenting eve-of-poll car bomb attack the province, no doubt carried out by rebel republicans, ought to blow away any such malaise since it stresses what today's vote is all about.

That is the choice between Northern Ireland taking a path to permanent peace and it sinking back into the hell of bloodshed, bigotry and hatred.

The bigots and the terrorists have already been firmly told by the referendum vote that the majority in Ulster want democracy and compromise.

Let us hope that message is underlined yet again today by a strong turn-out in these elections.

For it is not just that this is the most important election in a lifetime in Ulster, nor that its establishment of a new Assembly will give Northern Ireland the opportunity to run its own affairs for the first time since direct rule from Westminster was imposed in 1972.

It is all about rejecting the past, bridging the sectarian divide and burying the evil enmities that have soaked Ulster in blood and bitterness for too long.

Yes, voting for this new start will require the swallowing of many bitter pills.

But this election must not only generate the acceptance of that, it must also clearly prove by its outcome that Ulster's majority gives no support to those who would wreck this peace process from within or from outside.

And, surely, when the day comes that the new Assembly gathers for the first time, the time will have come for the men of violence to give up their weapons and for the die-hard bigots to accept, too, that their mandate - if it was ever granted to them at all by the people - no longer exists.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.