what are the inner marks gouged on people who lived there?

I stood once on the wet grass verge of a mean housing estate, looking at a burnt-out house.

The grass was wet from the firemen's hoses. Three little boys had burnt to death in the house in front of me not many hours before, for the crime of being Catholic in a Protestant enclave. Up and down the street, people who knew who'd torched the house . . . people who'd heard the children screaming . . .

peered from their doors. The neighbours, I thought. Just think what that word means when it goes bad.

If I haven't a balancing example of the depths of sectarian hatred as inflicted on the other side, it is because of the difficulties in the way of reporting from that side.

But I know what was done. I know that when it comes to the unforgivable, everybody has a share.

If the new Northern deal depended on owning up to bigotry, I don't suppose it would hold. The old hands sneered at me for not knowing about bigotry before I started going north. But we'd lived sheltered lives in the Republic. I had to learn . . .

incredulous . . . that I had only to open my mouth, or people had only to note the registration number of my car, to be disliked and mistrusted and excluded. The contempt was sometimes naked. I was going around an exhibition about the Famine era in his town in Co Armagh with the local mayor once, and he said, looking at an old photo of dreadful slums: "Of course, there's nothing like that now.

They have the best of housing and healthcare." By "they" he meant Catholics . . .

then and now the poor people in his town are Catholic people. And he turned to me and said with shocking venom: "And still they're not satisfied!"

If that man had to own up to his hatred for his own neighbours, I don't suppose he could do it. If they in turn had to utterly abandon for ever the consolation of lethal fantasies, not to mention of a united Ireland in which his power would be wiped out, I don't suppose they could do it, either.

But bigotry is going to be different, uncoupled from threat and fear.

Societies don't have to forgive. People do . . . I suppose that personal maturity isn't achieved until hurt and insult are detached from obsession and put in some kind of perspective. But societies have less integrity than people. The distances between people are wider and better ventilated than the distances within a person. A society with reasonably fair structures and rules and watchdogs and monitors, and more or less impartial avenues of appeal can be viable even though everyone in it is still angry. A benign political system works at making spaces and devising stratagems by which people can live side by side whether or not they despise each other, whether or not they say they can never forgive.

The world is full of such places. Not just the United States, where Orthodox Jew lives beside fundamentalist Christian, Armenian beside Turk, Shiite beside Sunni . . . though the US is surely humanity's most impressive achievement in the line of functioning tolerance. Europe, too, has celebrated this week the structures, marked in their youth by the Treaty of Rome, into which, in the last half-century, ancient enmities have been dispersed. And these were enmities that in our lifetime seemed ungovernable. There's a great monument to the Canadian dead of the first World War at Vimy Ridge which was still not quite finished when the Second World War broke out . . . as it were, around it. There were barely 20 years between the two huge bloodlettings. People forget that. And it's an excellent thing that they forget it.

The control of hatred is a separate thing from social justice; the same United States that allows of multiple co-existences is as unequal as you can get. Disadvantage will be a long time shifting its many shapes in Northern Ireland. But the basic social contract has to be secured before anything else. The fact is that there are quite a few people on this island who burnt or bombed or shot at or tortured other people and who don't regret that they did it and, if circumstances reverted to what they were, would do it again. There are very many more people whose lives have been completely deformed by that violence and hatred. Northern Ireland and to an extent the rest of Ireland is full of people who don't forgive. It is full of people who can't be forgiven.

It is a lesson in social maturity to accept that; and to accept that the politicians move in now to construct a political entity that works, not to build a society in which people are good.