The ugly scenes of rioting that have returned to Belfast's streets 14 years after the signing of the peace agreement are a sorry sight. But they tell a story of poor political leadership and of a demographic section of society left behind.
The riots follow a democratic decision taken by the Belfast City Council to reduce the number of days which the Union flag should fly at the city hall. For a capital city and a province of the United Kingdom that counts well over half of its citizens as loyal to the union with Britain, somewhat naturally, the flag removal decision irked a lot of people.
However there is a demographic section of Northern Ireland for which the decision has been more than irksome. For some it has been seen as a direct assault on their Britishness; an assault for them that's triggered a return to arms, violence, riots, death threats and petrol bombs. Something many of us thought that we'd seen the back of. But as the BBC NI correspondent Mark Simpson said, there's now a real sense that Belfast is going backwards.
But if you dig a little deeper into Northern Ireland society you will see that there are some people and communities who had never gone forward. And so in a sense the riots have been an event waiting to happen. Yes we have a peace agreement. Yes we have shared institutions. But we remain a divided and often backwards looking society; a divided and backwards looking society not only in terms of politics but also in terms of economics.
Unionists and nationalists who have the economic fortunes on their side have taken the post-1998 continuation of division in their stride. However those who live in economically deprived areas, especially protestant unionist working class areas, remain a people that time has forgotten. These are a people who without opportunity are devoid of ambition, drive and any sense of personal betterment.
As the reverent Robert Beckett rightly pointed out on BBC Radio 4 this community wide economic deprivation is a direct remnant of the Troubles which stained Belfast for nearly 40 years.
Reverend Beckett called it an underlying deterioration in the social fabric of working class unionism. Something which he said began during the Troubles when a great many fathers were imprisoned for sectarian crimes which caused the breakup of many families. Protestant working class children grew up without proper and normal parental discipline and routine.
It destroyed the moral fabric and made dysfunction the norm in protestant areas. This cycle of dysfunction continued over the years and decades and so the peace process has paid little dividend to a generation of young protestants who're now almost totally disconnected from the society around them.
But as well as familial and moral breakdown, Protestants have chronically underachieved at education. This contrasts with the working class Catholic community whose members largely value education and seek to better themselves. As a result, when the young Protestant men and women leave school they have no qualifications, poor literacy and numeracy skills and only have the capacity for low-paid menial work.
And these difficulties have only been compounded by the ongoing economic difficulties which have caused widespread unemployment. That in turn has caused boredom. And as the saying goes: the devil makes work for idle hands.
And that's the issue. Yes we've had genuine protesters who feel genuinely aggrieved by the decision to remove the Union Jack from the front of the Belfast city hall for all but 15 days of the year. However we have another type of protester: the young working class loyalist who's been left behind.
And so the rioters we've seen on our screen have been bored and disengaged recreational rioters. These are misguided, opportunistic young men orchestrated by loyalist paramilitary groups who seek to be seen as relevant again. The irony is that the culture that they seek to defend is being pulling through the mud by their very doing.
Just as the summer riots of 2011 unveiled a discontent and social rot the flag-riots have done the same. So we must address the cause, fix the illness and so stop anything like this happening in the future. We need to step down to these people and help them to help themselves. Otherwise Northern Ireland will remain a society forever divided and at a conflict stalemate.