IMAGINE being a child - not easy, granted, but give it a try - of Northern Ireland. Never mind which side you are on. What matters is how the future looks, not what the past has determined.

Try to think how it would be to

be the child of 30 years of unrelenting bitterness.

You can wave the bunting, you can bop for the cameras. But the the hurt and the bile won't go away. The most you can hope for is some kind of accommodation.The best you can hope for is probably an uneasy peace with your life this far.

The realisation that no-one can ever win the battle of Ulster brings fatigue and a hopeless feeling. If you are grown up you can imagine, if you try hard enough, how it's possible to find a kind of accommodation. But you are young and all you know is conflict. How can two such disparate, desperately different, communities who share one land ever live together? The coverage thus far anyway seems to suggest that now some kind of peace accord has been reached, everyone can live together happily. Children, smart, shrewd, and not as daft as they look, know it's nonsense. Maybe I'm young, they may think, but I know when grown-ups speak with forked tongue.

Look, they say: there's the grand old man of hate, Ian Paisley, with his prophets of doom bellowing loud and long . . . and very long: no. Then there's perhaps the most unlikely alliance ever assembled: Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists, Tony Blair and the Bolscombe Street Gang and the loyalists from the Maze. The Good Friday agreement said yes. The weekend's referendum heard them yell yes, yes. The people of Northern Ireland, altogether, said yes, yes, yes. You can dispute, if you are so desperate, the exact proportion of Unionists who voted yes. Maybe they don't need to know. People did not cast their votes in shades of orange and green.

But, as Mo Mowlam pointed out, a three-to-one victory hardly needs bolstering. And, more deeply, if the verdict of the people means anything, it reveals a desire to get away from the old sectarianism. But that is the atmosphere in which Northern Ireland's young have

been spawned, in which they have grown up. Where will they look now for inspiration?

What happens now? Only a month away comes the vote for the new assembly. In the politics of the province we hear echoes of the wars of religion and see played out 200 years later the clash between revolution and evolution that began in France. We see, clearly, the conflict between religious and secular identities and between liberal universalism and parochial nationalism. And what the young see is a never-ending feud that is their inheritance. What was most interesting in the aftermath of the yes vote was the subdued atmosphere in Ulster. No triumphalism, just a sense of weary relief. It indicated that the people know that the hardest work, the most difficult arguments, are still to come. The vote in itself does not dissolve conflict or sectarianism. There are prisoners - literal and metaphorical - to be released, on both sides, and a lot of fury to be assuaged still.

Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is that all of those who helped in the Yes campaign will be able to extend a hand, if not of friendship then at least of kinship, to the No voters. There is a generosity in being inclusive that can sway even the most ardent. Still, the biggest obstacle to ending gun rule in Northern Ireland remains the IRA refusal to decommission arms. Sinn Fein has to make clear that the war is over and that means announcing a commitment to peaceful means.

The Orange Order can display its own good faith, surely, by showing sensitivity and cancelling at least some of its traditional Orange parades. It's a wish list, yes: but why not?

When I was 12 a friend invited me to her house. The door was opened and quickly shut again by her father. My sin was to wear a green scarf. It was my first experience of true bigotry. Not that he was a bad man, nor was he unkind on subsequent visits. But there was within that house an unflinching belief that Catholics, anyone who wore the green, were damned. Contact meant they might be tainted. The idea that my own children might come across such bigotry seems bizarre. They don't know to question the identity of religion, only to wonder why it causes problems. They will ask why they are not christened but not which kind of religion we would christen them into.

Me, I'm a religious bastard. The child of a mixed marriage who experienced the crazy shenanigans involved in arguing over which faith the children should be brought up in. The Catholics lost.

My sister and I were wheeched off to be christened in an evangelical mission hall when the marriage broke down.

It's hard to know whether to laugh or deride a culture which fought over how two children should be taught to

interpret Christianity.

My own children are disappointed that they were not christened. Not, I suspect, because they feel any sense of loss, but because, like most human beings, they want to recognise a rite of passage. But growing up in a household where marriage between two Christian faiths could cause such conflict and unhappiness, there is no argument yet that persuades me that opting out of religion causes more damage than adhering to it.