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¶ When the woman on the microphone in the Drumcree Community Centre, a five-minute walk from the Garvaghy Road, began by saying, “Anyone who’s not from round here…” I was grateful. How do we help, just off the train from Dublin, respectful. She didn’t mean it like that though. “You can take showers in the football club just round the corner,” she said, gesturing behind her.

She stressed she wasn’t saying that people in the room, wide and bright and open, were smelly, she just knew many had been there for some time and could be there a while longer. The football club had toiletries for anyone stuck, for the families with small children. She introduced her colleagues, behind her in a room packed with foodstuffs, telling the room if anyone had dirty washing to put it in a bag and give it to one of them. They’d take care of it. “We’ll not look through your stuff.”

Earlier I’d asked another woman behind a counter if they accepted card, looking for a coffee. No, they didn’t, she said, but I could make a donation if I wanted. But you don’t have to. There was a sign with PayPal details stuck on one of the hall’s walls, she said. But you don’t have to.

Beside that PayPal sign were notices about the centre. One said it was genocide free, compliant with the BDS movement, another celebrated a recent fundraiser for Gaza that brought in nearly £4,000. Down the back of the hall hoodies, t-shirts, brollies and coats raised funds for the effort that had brought the community together. They were clear: NO GOING BACK over graphics of men from the Orange Order.

¶ A young singer, Chloe Fortune, had come from Wexford, driven by her dad, to sing a song she’d written about Garvaghy Road. We were encouraged to head up the road to hear her. Flags flew from electricity poles along the way: the Irish tricolour, the Irish Republic, Free Palestine, the Starry Plough.

The Garvaghy Road transcends itself but on a Friday afternoon people drive up and down it on their way to wherever, the same as any other road in Ireland. Some beep at the crowds and symbols along their way.

The tricolour is contested down south. You see one in the 26 and think what is it: is that a republican socialist tricolour or a racist tricolour? I understand why people fly them at Palestine marches, the associated politics they imply. The parts of Dublin whose residents coordinate to fly them remind me of Bushmills the week of twelfth.

At a Keep Left event I moderated before the Dublin Central byelection this year I reluctantly asked about our flag. The Labour candidate drew laughter when she said she didn’t like them flown in residential areas and would prefer if they were kept for official state ceremonies at the GPO and the like, the flag of the southern state.

When the southern Irish right wing fly their tricolours they’re exclusionary. Along with excluding certain skin colours and ancestries, some deny that the north is Ireland. They share that denial with southern liberals for whom this conflict over the proposed Orange march is further reason to oppose the united Ireland they’ve never wanted.

Up at the top of the hill on the Garvaghy Road, two men on a grassy mound overlooking a pop-up Gaeltacht in a tent – goidé mar atá – unfurl a tricolour and smile as their friend takes photos. I don’t know anything about their politics, whether the southern liberals who deny their Irishness would consider them progressive, but I do know that when they fly the Irish flag in the north, they say, to me, we are with you.

Alongside the flags there’s graffiti reading FUCK THE SASH. And why not.

¶ Could this be the end of Stormont? Yeah I hope so. End of the union.

That was the chat on the road. The British prime minister, with his northern secretary and according to the Good Friday Agreement, gets to decide. And the union can still rely on its defenders left behind – more accurately, in national security vernacular, stay behind – to mobilise against what they think are threats.

American journalist and author Chris Hedges was part of the crew I went up with. We’d been given advice about how to get to Garvaghy Road, told there’d been loyalist protests on the way that were best avoided and that we might struggle to get a taxi. We were also told if we managed to get a taxi we might aggravate the driver. “Oh I can just tell them I’m a Presbyterian minister,” said Chris, implicitly acknowledging he’s not the right kind of Presbyterian minister for these guys.

A young man aged about 20 in Susan McKay’s Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People addresses a 1998 protest in Portadown. A circle had formed around him, a crowd moved by the "incandescence of his anger” at the Orange Order’s march being stopped. “If we are not down that road by Monday, we’ll wreck Drumcree and we’ll wreck the fucking peace process. If they don’t give us the Garvaghy Road, we’ll fucking take it by force. I’m telling you,” he said. He’d be nearly 50 now.

From the train station, past one of the biggest Poundlands I’ve ever come across, on Portadown’s main street one of the bigger Union Jacks still flies. The fucking peace process hasn’t been wrecked yet.

Brendan Hughes had his doubts about the process but he went along with it. As far back as 2000, two years after the Belfast Agreement, he saw, “Never in the history of republicanism was so much sacrificed and so little gained,” with benefits reserved for a new northern ruling class and a persistent divide for everyone else. He wasn’t seeking return to the past though. “Let us think most strongly before going down that road again. I am simply questioning the wisdom of administering British rule in this part of Ireland. I am asking what happened to the struggle in all Ireland – what happened to the idea of a 32-county socialist republic,” he wrote.

There is no going down that road again.

I went for a late morning coffee and croissant today in Naomh Fionnbarra in Cabra. Great club, great start to a Saturday. There were children playing our Gaelic games, their parents chatting over pastries at the side of the pitch, club members in their quarter-zips, like their counterparts in the Drumcree Community Centre the day before.

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