IT seems a grand night for a public meeting. A late sun shines on the just and unjust alike, and at Belfast's Donegal Pass a sizeable neighbourhood crowd is gathering in a church hall to hear a variant on the Loyalist anthem, No Surrender. Tonight, Paisleyism and Progressive Unionism will sit at the same table but at opposite ends - Edwin Poots and David Ervine, intransigence versus hope.

The hall has the sterile air of a detention centre for refugees, and, indeed, there will be many moments during the next hour-and-a-half when the feeling of going nowhere is oppressive.

In a corner an upright piano and three kettle drums stand in seasoned, almost gloating challenge, and high in the roof strands of overlooked green Christmas tinsel cling dismally to a beam. We sit, straight-backed, in orange stacking chairs.

On the eve of the Referendum poll this meeting symbolises much of what must be overcome if Northern Ireland is to enjoy equity with the civilised world. So here is Ervine not in enemy territory but territory suddenly confused by his Protestant hand in the Peace Accord of Good Friday.

''How can we vote for anything which the other side supports?'' shouts a woman from the second row. ''If republicans are voting Yes overwhelmingly, it stands to reason we must vote No.''

But reason has always been the missing element in Northern Ireland, and what is being attempted now is a sort of lobotomy reversal, injecting thought into the tribal mind-sets of both sides.

Yet here is Poots, a DUP councillor from Lisburn, telling us his father was shot at in the early years of The Troubles, thus entrenching victimhood as a divine right to alter nothing. In the room there are others who could claim the same credential, Ervine among them.

But he is contemptuous of those who peddle the sympathy vote, preferring to detail his part in what history teaches is the classic conversion of militant activist to peacemaker. He served his time in the Maze prison for being caught with the makings of a bomb, ''not because I wanted to be a bad person but because the circumstances then drove me and many others to it. And we were wrong''.

For Ervine, the past 30 years have been a class struggle as much as anything. His Progressive Unionist Party was founded in the late Seventies as a working class fringe organisation, the political wing of the paramilitary, UVF. But Ervine's eloquence and visionary qualities earned him an impressive place at the Stormont Talks, flagging up the PUP's increasing voice in mainstream politics.

It is the distinction which probably earns him more enemies among Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and the blockading right-wing of David Trimble's Ulster Unionists than within Sinn Fein.

Poots, in contrast, can be defined only by glum obduracy and a nervous cough. For the minute, he may have a significant claque in the audience, but he is a passionless champion.

''I helped to create the agreement,'' Ervine tells the crowd, ''and you may think I'm a naive fool or even an MI5 agent. But from the depths of my heart I believe it's as good as it gets. The Union is safeguarded; the controlling element is the principle of consent. I'm telling you, it's copper-fastened every inch of the way by these five words - the will of the people.''

Poots can't see it. The Accord, he says, is the Anglo-Irish Agreement by another name.

''Do you want to see Martin McGuinness as your minister of health?''

''You're winding people up,'' retorts one man, but by now a significant gender split is evident in the hall, with what might be called the female equivalent of South Africa's Eugene Terre Blanche becoming almost choral with disgust.

''This agreement asks us to respect the Irish language, respect their culture. What about our culture?'' one woman demands.

Poots is only animated when nodding, but Ervine answers that respect for and encouragement of minority languages is EU social policy.

''And anyway, just because we haven't made the most of our culture where's the sense in blaming nationalists for the popularity of Irish dancing, the bodhran and all the rest. We've got the Orange marches, but that's all. Whoever taught us our Scots-Irish culture, whoever taught us our history. The politics of our community hasn't served the people well.''

Nowhere is this more evident than in education. In Northern Ireland the 11-plus exam is still in place and in working class Catholic areas the pass rate is 12%, while in the Protestant working class neighbourhoods the pass rate is 3%, with only 1% going on to further education.

''That doesn't bode well for the future. How do we root out bigotry if those statistics prevail.''

Poots, though, is still on the treadmill of exclusion.

''I don't want to be governed by ex-prisoners, people with blood on their hands. Do you?''

From the end of a row a man with the kind of shaven head which was once the convict's trademark, shouts at the speaker and the women's little platoon to end their hypocrisy.

''You in the DUP campaigned for prisoners when it suited you. There've been thousands of ex-prisoners walking about Northern Ireland for years.''

Ervine interjects: ''In Belfast alone there are 500 ex-lifers on the streets. Some are shopkeepers, some are politicians, some are ministers of religion.''

As for decommissioning, Ervine cuts through the unwieldy language of clauses to present his own clarification: ''If the weapons aren't being used, then we can create the democratic conditions where they won't ever be used. Therefore it's everyone's responsibility to see that happen.''

Earlier in the day, Gerry Adams had said something similar, insisting that a major achievement in recent years had been the informal decommissioning of IRA weapons, which had already been placed in dumps. But the fact is that no paramilitary organisation has stated categorically that it is prepared to surrender its arsenal.

Historically, any notion of compromise has been anathema to Sinn Fein and the IRA, so can we trust what Ervine calls ''this seismic shift in their ideology'', their acceptance of unionism and that the constitution of Northern Ireland will only be changed by the people's consent?

Conor Cruise O'Brien, Ireland's most distinguished scholar and now regarded as rogue sage for his collaboration with the No campaign, believes simply that the IRA and Sinn Fein have become more crafty.

''They have learned to intersperse violence with combinations of ceasefires and blackmail about resumption. But there is no change in their psychology and it showed in the greeting for the Balcombe Street people,'' he says.

Ervine, who lobbied hard for prisoners' release in the Peace Talks marathon, doesn't deny the distress caused by the triumphalism of that Sinn Fein general meeting and, indeed the repugnance caused also by the loyalists' welcome for Michael Stone. But he is adamant from his own intelligence-gathering that the armed struggle is over.

So, what the Yes campaign represents is a multi-faceted education process where the belief that Unionists and Sinn Fein cannot sit at the same assembly table is already nonsense. There are 13 Sinn Fein councillors on Belfast City Council, and, by most accounts, Belfast works exceptionally well.

''The old ways of talking, of saying 'I'm right and you're wrong', are over,'' says Monica McWilliams, of the Women's Coalition and professor of social policy at Ulster University, who will contest Belfast South for an Assembly seat.

''For 30 years, we all did things wrong here and now we have the opportunity to begin to do things right.'' There is no capacity, she says, for an acceptable alternative to the Agreement. But a single word sums up the inevitable fallback option for the unreconstructed some - murder.