WATCHING Northern Ireland set ablaze again in an explosion of hatred and fear that puts the clock back years and probably kills off the peace process too, the issue, I think, is not who was to blame for the return of the madness and evil that had beset the province for 25 years.

For it is an academic question whether the police - and their political masters - were right to cave in to mass defiance of the ban on an Orange Order march in Portadown last week, triggering, it is alleged, nationalist anger and violence and all that has followed since.

We already know where the blame really lies - in the fathomless religious and cultural bigotry of those beer-bellied Loyalist marchers; in the whipping-up of it by their pipsqueak politicians; in the reflected fear and loathing that the nationalists learn at their parents' knees and in the way a maltreated minority can zealously nurse and magnify the wrongs of history. But do we on the mainland understand it? No, we are just appalled by it - and are sick of it.

Sick of the bloodshed there and when it is brought to our doorstep; sick of the other costs of Northern Ireland - as taxpayers here subside each of the province's residents to the tune £3,100 a year now; sick of the fruitless dialogue in which both sides seek not compromise but unattainable "victory".

And it made me think how, before this latest setback, we had one MP on his feet in the Commons with a waspish Bill that would allow the rest of Britain, not just those of Scotland and Wales, a vote in the referenda on devolution that a Labour government would permit.

It is not my desire, but I can see that same idea being eventually translated to the Northern Ireland problem. The longer its bigoted people persist in their madness, the more the rest of us will find the temptation to get rid of them will increase - and devolution could be the device.

Though this week John Major spoke of Northern Ireland being just as much a part of the United Kingdom as Surrey and of the moral and political obligation we have to do what we can, I think that sentiment is being sorely tested by the endemic desire by so many in Ulster to keep their sectarian warfare alive rather than end it.

Indeed, I'm sure that, in a referendum, the rest of Britain would vote by a landslide for "home rule" for Northern Ireland and letting the factions there fight as long as they wished, just as long as we could be rid of them for good.

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