The hot season in Northern Ireland starts in June and ends at the end of July, but you won't notice the temperature rising. What does go up is the tension level between the Protestant and the Catholic communities, who each year at this time, are even more inclined to glower at one another than usual. And this follows a script that is incredibly repetitive and just more of the same, the marching season, when the Protestants parade in memory of historical events seen as glorious by one side and humiliating by the other. And in the coming weeks, in the stalled political limbo in Northern Ireland at present, this could easily agitate the radical fringes and cause clashes.

What is at stake in marching season, in this slice of Ireland that belongs to the United Kingdom, is the same old bone of contention: the members of the Orange lodges - nineteenth-century associations who are inflexible custodians of Protestant traditions and the mythology of the unionist movement - insist on parading along pre-established routes that often pass through areas that are mostly and sometimes only inhabited by the Catholic minority. On the one side, there is the legitimate wish to exercise a right, and the poorly hidden desire to show, once again; who is boss in Ulster. On the other side, the sense of being victims of an imposition that is repeated each year.

There are hundreds of Protestant parades between June and July. In all the cities in Northern Ireland, the lodges have some date or other to remember and for many families in the Protestant community the day of the march is a holiday, a big village feast; a chance to eat outdoors and get happily drunk. Most of the marches are peaceful, but for some of the largest the police is out in force keeping an eye on the proceedings and in recent years a Parade Commission has been established, which can forbid a certain route being used if it is considered a possible cause of trouble.

The most important parade is the one on the 12th of July, the glorious Twelfth as the Protestants call it. That is the day when, in 1690, the Protestant king William III of Orange defeated the Catholic king James II in the battle of the river Boyne, thus establishing, for the centuries to come, the rule and supremacy of the (Protestant) Scots and English colonists over the (Catholic) Irish. The event is anticipated as none other by the Northern Irish Protestant community: in the early morning, along the parade route, entire families will start finding places to show their support for the thousands of Orangemen who take part in the parade, dressed in traditional sashes and bowlers and accompanied by the grim sound of the Lambeg drums.

In 2003 the marching season was unusually calm. A definite difference compared to former years, when for a few days the entire region was laid waste by the loyalist paramilitaries, armed groups who are obsessively loyal to the British Crown and ready to fight to keep the ties with London. Almost nothing happened, except for minor skirmishes which were widely expected. And Northern Ireland, as always happens when things are quiet, was again forgotten by everybody. But the risks of a return to violence are real, though not at the level at the end of the Nineties. While the rest of the world looked on indifferently, the elections for the renewal of the Northern Irish Assembly - suspended by London in October of 2002 - and the recent European elections have turned the political situation in the region upside down.

Among the four major parties, with the distribution of votes unavoidably reflecting the divide between the two communities, the moderates have lost votes to the more extreme parties. Among the Protestants, the Democratic Unionist Party (Dup) of the Reverend Ian Paisley - who is openly contemptuous of Catholics and considers the Pope the Antichrist - has become the first party (at the European election it got an incredible 32 per cent of the votes), reversing the former situation with the Ulster Unionist Party of John Trimble, one of the main backers of the 1998 peace agreements. And the same happened to the nationalists, (as the Catholics are known politically), as Sinn Fein - traditionally the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (Ira) - overtook the other party that had strongly backed the Good Friday Agreements, the moderates of the Social Democratic Labour Party (Sdlp).

There are precise reasons for this triumph of the extremists: the Northern Irish have lost faith after the parties' interminable tug-of-war to implement the contests of those agreements. The Stormont Assembly, which according to devolution, granted by London after 25 years of direct rule, had ample powers of self-government, was not working smoothly. Distrust between the unionist and nationalist parties was the order of the day, with the UUP accusing Sinn Fein (and not wrongly) of not having broken all ties to the IRA even after the ceasefire in 1994. Tired of this paralysis, London suspended the Assembly.

A year and a half later, the future of self-government in Northern Ireland is still uncertain: the Dup - who don't mind direct rule at all - refuse to shake hands with the members of Sinn Fein, let alone share executive power with them. And Sinn Fein wouldn't dream of severing ties to the IRA, so as not to be put in a position of weakness.
While waiting for an agreement that may or may not come, negotiations have been taking place for some time, and both the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Irish Premier Bertie Ahern are part of them. "An agreement between Dup and Sinn Fein might not be as impossible as everyone thinks"- says William Graham, political analyst for the newspaper Irish News -. The Dup wants devolution, but on its own terms and it knows it is in its best interests to delay as long as possible, even to the next British elections, to negotiate from an even stronger position. But Sinn Fein won't give up its expectations either".

In this stalled climate, the risk is that the extremist groups on both sides will turn to violence again, and the Orangemen's marches could be an easy pretext. The Protestants are angry at the police if the Parade Commission keeps them from using a certain route (a parade along the very Catholic Springfield Road in Belfast, expected for this Saturday, has already been forbidden), the Catholics are furious if the Orangemen march through their areas, and a night fight at the contact points between the ghettos of the two communities is enough to touch off the violence. The Northern Irish who are tired of this, and there are many, know how it works. And it is no coincidence that Belfast empties around the glorious Twelfth. Everyone goes on vacation, to spend a few days in peace, leaving the professionals of chaos to their own devices.

Alessandro Ursic