Many Orange parades are just a family day out. But too often marching through Catholic areas means huge rings of steel imprisoning residents in their homes. Yet a parade through a beleaguered nationalist neighbourhood is a million miles from Orangemen and IRA victims marching in O'Connell Street . . . a main commercial thoroughfare. Leinster House is an appropriate location for a political rally.

They'll be in Dublin, not as a swaggering majority, but as a minority. There's nothing triumphalist or threatening about it. They're not about to retake the GPO and raise the Union Jack. The Orange Order is sectarian to its core but the test of any democracy is the freedom it allows its staunchest opponents. No one has ever resisted Orangemen marching on Belfast's main thoroughfare, Royal Avenue, every July.

What makes O'Connell Street more special?

Opposing this march is deeply partitionist. Until 1998, the Republic claimed jurisdiction over the North and, despite the abandonment of Articles 2 and 3, it is still asserted that northerners, Catholic and Protestant, are Irish. So if loyalists want to march in 'their' capital city, they should be welcome.

The biggest inconvenience will be traffic disruption for one hour one Saturday afternoon . . . many Northerners put up with this two or three times a week in summer months. If Orangemen are good enough to march in the North, they're good enough for the South. If southern protesters came North last July and blocked Royal Avenue I'd have more respect for them. But then staging a protest outside the GPO is a far safer venture for Saturday afternoon 'republicans' than facing thousands of loyalists and police in Belfast city centre.

Some opponents of this march aren't acting in solidarity with six-county nationalists at all. They just want all this "Northern nonsense" to stay firmly across the border. Others, underneath their PC arguments, are simply bigots . . . they don't want an Orangeman about the place.

Republican Sinn Fein and the 32 County Sovereignty Movement are also championing the opposition.

Their supporters are horrified the parade will pass the hallowed ground of Pearse and Connolly. With the tricolour of green, white and orange flying over the GPO, it's entirely appropriate that the 'orange' pass beneath it. The tricolour, acknowledging the Orange tradition, was first unfurled in 1848 when the order was even more right wing and reactionary. And yet republicans then were inclusive.

Is opposing a few hundred Orangemen and widows in O'Connell Street really the most pressing concern for those who believe Pearse and Connolly's republic has never been achieved?

The march is allegedly insensitive to the 1974 Dublin bombing victims. Yet Britain allowed republican demonstrations while the IRA bombed British cities.

Sinn Fein speakers have addressed countless rallies there. If the British state, repressive as it was to Irish people, still allowed republican rallies, the Irish state must tolerate a loyalist one. Yes, this march focuses on IRA victims but many republican rallies have concentrated solely (and very legitimately) on the victims of loyalist and state violence.

Willie Frazer's opinions might be anathema to many nationalists, but the fact remains he lost 11 relatives and close friends to the IRA.

Republicanism embraces the unity of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.

You can't pick and choose your Protestants. The Dublin march presents a threat to no one. Opposing it is bigotry or partitionism dressed up as patriotism. It's certainly not republicanism.