ALCOHOL may well have been the fuel for last night's rioting by loyalists in Belfast, angered by the RUC's ban on a Protestant Apprentice Boys' parade marching along the nationalist Lower Falls Road.

But, as a watching world saw stones, bottles and petrol bombs hurled at the police by the mob, what was actually on display was the real inspiration for the violence - the mad and blind sectarian hatred that makes sane people despair of Ulster.

Yes, the rioters were a minority and a fringe element of the marchers.

But what they dangerously represent to the neutral onlooker is not just the endemic senselessness of the bigotry that characterises the province's Catholic-Protestant divide, but also the proud and resolute clinging to it in the name of heritage and tradition.

And all this while a fragile peace effort stumbles uneasily towards the a precious, but still-distant goal of bringing lasting tolerance and accord to Northern Ireland.

Not only do these hate-inspired outbreaks of violence undermine that effort, they also sap the will of the participants and jeopardise the hopes of the millions craving peace.

And what appals it is not just the dread prospect of the renewed violence escalating, causing the abandonment of the peace process and plunging Ulster back into a new age of terror with no end in sight.

It is also the actual evil of the prized and paraded values of sectarian hatred that is as contemptible as it is alien to the Christian faith which is deemed by both sides to uphold it.

And the practitioners of this corruption - these so-called men of God - are as bad as the actual terrorists, for they are their congregation.

For that sentiment to be the basis of the tradition and heritage that are expressed in Ulster's so-called marching season makes the tradition worthy only of the peace-lovers' scorn and ought, surely, to invite the authorities to put a blanket ban on the marches of both sides.

But better still, since they are such potential flashpoints and are inherently hostile to the peace process, would be for the marchers themselves to voluntarily abandon them - at least while the peace process continues - so that they give tangible support to the majority's desire for peace and so that mob rule cannot follow in their footsteps.

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