ONCE again, Ulster erupts into violence as the loyalist marching season provides the flashpoint.

Like last year, it is the decision to allow the Portadown Orangemen to march their traditional route down the Catholic Garvaghy Road in Drumcree that provokes nationalist anger.

And, as the world sees, the backlash is delivered with the venom of riot, arson and gunfire.

But while independent observers, not versed in the complexities of Northern Ireland's politics and history, may only express exasperated bewilderment that the province can explode into violence over a dispute over the right of a group of bowler-hatted men to march down a short stretch of road, is that reaction not an accurate summation of all that is wrong in Ulster?

For what it laments is not just the enduring inability of either side of the sectarian Catholic-Protestant, Loyalist-Republican divide to find compromise, but their sheer unwillingness to do so.

Drumcree is but a microcosm of the mutual malice in Ulster that sane, ordinary people find inexplicable.

True, the ins and out of this recurring situation are manifold. Was the RUC right to allow the march - in the view that there might have been even more violence if had been banned or re-routed?

Could not the Orangemen bring themselves to compromise - by asserting their right to march, but not exercising it?

Could not the Catholic community demonstrate their contempt for a demonstration of so-called Protestant triumphalism - by simply ignoring it?

Yet this, like the whole vexed Ulster problem, is simply detail.

For is not the crux of the entire situation the fact that the preferred tradition of still too many, on both sides, is blind hatred?

As the smoke billows over Ulster once more the grim conclusion, it seems, is that it is so.

And as politicians toil for a solution and the security forces are given the thankless task of containing the physical expressions of that hate, they must, like millions appalled and perplexed observers around the world, wonder when it will ever end.

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