I take it for granted that the other side doesn't daily heap brimstone on my head only because its tactic is to pretend that the Republic isn't there at all, and that if it is, it has no right to comment on matters northern.

Insofar as I understand what's not going on up there, the sticking points seem extremely serious. It will be a huge change in their culture when loyalists share some kind of genuine executive with republicans.

And it will be the end not just of an era, but of eras stretching back to the early 17th century, when republicans accept an order and laws for which Westminster is ultimately responsible.

But that doesn't mean it is at all interesting for the outsider to sit around waiting for these concessions to be made. It certainly seems to me that, not only will they be made sooner or later, but that if it is later, it doesn't greatly matter . . . that life has settled down in Northern Ireland in an irrevocable way (bar the crazies) and will go on being settled, no matter which bits of what agreement are supposedly in force.

In other words, there's no hurry, lads. No one's holding their breath.

But I was made sincerely ashamed of my own flippancy by the near-unbelievable suggestion, made, it seems, by "British government representatives in Rome", that the queen of England and the pope be invited to visit Northern Ireland more or less simultaneously to celebrate the bringing about of socalled peace by the latest ingenious attempt to establish power-sharing that doesn't look like power-sharing . . . the one that would be referred to as the St Andrew's Agreement, if in fact it was ever mentioned in normal conversation.

For one awful moment, I felt what it must be like actually to be from Northern Ireland, or to live there, and to have to put up with being patronised from a height by every idiot in the English establishment, who, if this suggestion is anything to go by, privately think of the North as if it is inhabited by cartoon characters . . . mad papists on one side, mad royalists on the other. People who think that response to a very difficult political settlement can be manipulated by rushing symbolic figures onto northern territory for a few hours. It would be a few hours, I need hardly say . . . the diaries of the demigods are booked up years ahead. But whoever made the suggestion must believe that even a short visit, from behind 20 layers of bodyguards, would be enough to dazzle the people of the North.

What kind of people do these distant governors think northern people are? Something on the lines of natives of New Guinea, who worship bits of airplanes? Britain's colony in Ireland has had hundreds of years to perfect internal structures of exploitation, oppression and bitter subversion now being painstakingly dismantled. There is a well of malice there that is practically bottomless.

Very recently, each side watched without pity their neighbours being gravely wounded.

The worst is certainly over, but the bar has been set almost impossibly high for co-operation.

And with all this, some civil servant or diplomat thinks that parading the very tribal icons that started the Troubles off in 1611 or whenever is a lovely little idea.

My outrage has nothing to do with practicalities, though I assume that someone sane pointed out that the logistics of a simultaneous visit would be impossible. For one thing, you couldn't just bring in her majesty for the Prods and not let Catholics with a lively interest in the monarchy get a look at her. The pontiff, on the other hand, couldn't be paraded around loyalist areas at all, due to sincere, fundamentalist objections to his very existence. Is Pope Benedict the Whore of Babylon or is he not? That's what the people Ian Paisley has fed on bigotry would want to know, and it would put the queen in an impossible position . . . she owning the place, and Pope Benedict being her guest. That's just for starters.

But the point is that a visit from anyone at all would be nothing but a sideshow. Patsy McGarry of the Irish Times . . . who got this story from "sources" . . . should go back to the sources and break the news to them that the people in Northern Ireland are both as simple and as complex as any other people. That most of them want what people the world over want . . . to live with normal access to education and employment and advantage, with a normal amount of self-approval, under fairly competent managers who are backed by a reasonably even-handed judicial system. That waving relics at them . . . and both the queen and the pope are, politically speaking, relics of ancient regimes . . . does not send them home to bed starry-eyed. And that if it did, the place would be in even more trouble than it is in today.