Gerry Adams hit the nail on the side when he remarked on Sunday following the RIR’s Belfast parade: “This is ... an Irish town and for the British Army to host a march at this time is totally and absolutely reprehensible.”

Belfast is certainly an Irish town. But it is a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland town, too. This was explicitly confirmed in the 1998 Multi-Party Agreement and is, surely, morally binding on all who endorsed the Agreement.

True, the Agreement was also explicit that partition would remain only for as long as a majority within the North wanted it so. But this has been the unionist position all along. Ian Paisley spelt it out more than 30 years ago: if a majority in the North voted for a merger with the South, he wouldn’t welcome the development, of course, but, as a democrat, he’d have to accept it.

If the war waged by the Provisional IRA was about partition and the constitutional status of the North, it lost, and the Agreement was acknowledgement that it had lost.

This does not subtract from the right of relatives of people killed directly by the British Army or through collusion with loyalist paramilitaries to protest against a parade such as last Sunday’s, or of opponents of imperialist war to call in the name of decency for its cancellation. It does mean that the ground for objection to the parade put forward by Mr Adams — Irish town, British Army — coming from a pro-Agreement quarter, had no political legitimacy.

This is not a point which has figured prominently in editorial commentary on Sunday’s parade and protests. There is an unwritten law, still at least semi-operative, that no communal leader should be pushed too hard to face up to the implications of the Agreement for his or her ideology. Deft misrepresentation of the Agreement (or ‘creative ambiguity’ with regard to its provisions) continues unabated.

An honest nationalist approach to the Agreement would have been rooted in a recommendation to accept a continuation of partition and the inclusion of the North within the UK for as far into the future as it was possible to see in return for a rock-solid guarantee in of equal rights for nationalists and nationalism within the State.

Similarly, pro-Agreement unionists would have been more honest with themselves and their supporters had they campaigned for a Yes vote on the basis that untrammelled unionist rule and the practices that went with it were over and done with and that nationalism and nationalists would henceforth enjoy equal status with unionism and unionists in a State which, as a quid-pro-quo, would remain part of the UK.

Had the Agreement been endorsed on both sides on that basis, we might be in a different, better place today. But there was no serious requirement placed on either side from any quarter to face the implications of the document they’d signed up to. At the time of the referendum, indeed, any suggestion that the glaring contradictions be acknowledged and examined was widely regarded as unhelpful, disruptive, even indicative of resistance to peace.

The result has been a 10-year effort to implement and consolidate a political arrangement on the basis of separate, irreconcilable versions of what the arrangement entails, and a determined refusal to admit consideration of any alternative perspective on the way forward.

Thus it is today that Sinn Fein and Agreement late-comers the DUP can each present a convincing argument that it’s the other side which is acting in bad faith.

When there’s no common understanding of the deal, there can be no agreement on who’s in default. There is no way of working out whether Peter Robinson or Martin McGuinness is right about the context in which the Executive could or should be called into session. How could there be when they don’t agree on what the founding document of the Executive means?

This is, at the least, a significant factor in the continuing instability at Stormont and in the persistence and even sharpening of the communal divide on display in the streets of Belfast four days ago.

On this reading, it is the politics of the Agreement, and of the way the Agreement was put in place, which has produced gridlock in the institutions and helped prolong conflict on the streets.

The paradox is that, to a greater extent than at any time in the past decade, the priorities in the minds of the people — including many of the people out in Belfast last Sunday — don’t have to do with another round in an Orange-Green trial of strength, but with the difficulty of making ends meet.

No doubt, the top people in the two top parties want the impasse resolved. The strategy — insofar as we can discern anything sufficiently coherent to be described as a strategy — consists of fumbling sleight-of-hand. At this stage, what else?

The Agreement is not the solution but part of the problem.