There can't be many grand carnivals in the world that are preceded by a mass evacuation of the city in which they are held. But every July, as Belfast anticipates the Twelfth fortnight and a massive festival of colour and music through the streets, huge numbers go off on holiday - many timing their trip specifically to avoid the occasion.

Those who go include people who feel the Twelfth has no relevance to their lives. They may be Catholics who feel offended by it, or just indifferent to it. They certainly include Protestants and others who have as little enthusiasm for it themselves.

They may just want to avoid the embarrassment of their children seeing it and wanting to join in. I remember bringing an English friend and her little girl to see the parade and the tears from the child when we took her flag away as we returned home through Catholic streets. How could we ever explain it to her?

And the tradition is well-established that the Twelfth fortnight is holiday time; businesses expect to wind down and let people go.

Yet many in the Orange tradition do want the Twelfth to be preserved as an attraction to tourists. They don't want others to be offended by their traditional celebration.

They seem wounded by the routine charge that the parade is an act of coat-trailing designed to embarrass Catholic neighbours and lord it over them.

They argue that contentious parades which draw protests and trouble are out of character with the season itself; that they are exceptions to the thousands of parades which are peaceful.

And if you say that Orangemen should withdraw from streets in which their parades spark trouble, they will usually blame the trouble on others and proclaim that they are defending their civil liberties.

That's what Orangeism is all about, civil liberties - and the Protestant tradition which is the font and guarantor of those liberties.

So how might Orangeism acquire a more congenial image? How might the Twelfth transform itself into something like the Notting Hill Carnival, or Mardi Gras?

The problem is that the Twelfth cannot be inclusive. It is a Protestant event and few, if any, non-Protestants are going to want to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne.

When Orangemen urge us to respect their carnival, they try to turn our attention away from the drunkenness and the sectarian bonfire parties to the serious religious core of it.

But that is the part that is least likely to appeal to tourists and others in a modern, secularising culture.

The only conceivable way in which that tradition would come to be enjoyable and intriguing would be if it was neutralised and became quaint - like morris dancing. Then, though, it would have become a shadow of itself.

We might all want to don bowler hats and sashes and beat drums and march along the road if the very act of doing so had been stripped of all serious ideological content and had merely become fun for everybody.

We might all play at being Protestants for a day if we weren't strongly committed to being anything else on any other day. But that is not a vision of the revived and preserved Twelfth; it is a vision of its death and rebirth as parody.

But, then again, that's probably what many real carnivals now are. I doubt if many people getting high and debauched at Mardi Gras have any strong sense that the following day is Ash Wednesday and they are facing into the abstinence of Lent.

The point about Orangeism, surely, is that they don't want others to join in and to make a mockery of their self-assured sense of Protestant pride.

They don't want the parade to be preserved as a relic of a dead tradition; they want their tradition to be respected while it is still alive and marching.

In that case, perhaps their ambitions have to be lower.

They are faced with a general decline in religion. This means that many people will not feel particularly insulted by Orange disdain for Catholicism because they will not feel strongly protective of the Catholic tradition, or any other religious tradition.

But they also incline to thinking that in a 'live and let live' world, any assertion of difference in the civic arena is in bad taste.

Then there is the other paradox about the parades; that while Orangemen want to be respected for their religious propriety, they actually align themselves with a carnival which is ribald and bacchanalian.

While they want to be regarded as Christian, they are weak on their commitment to loving their neighbour. For years the lodges have taken the ambiguous position of insisting that they have no part in the sectarian brutishness of some of the bands and the hangers-on.

But the outsider sees only the one big festival and wonders why people who regard themselves as decent Christians don't distance themselves from the hatemongers who want to join in.

But these are old questions that the Orange Order has had decades to reflect on and provide answers to and their failure suggests they aren't bothered by them.

They will march and beat their drums through streets, indifferent to the fact that thousands of their neighbours have simply gone away for the week and left them to it.

And they will never ask themselves why they are unloved.