What Northern Ireland is facing now is not remotely on the scale of 1971 and the balance of power and political complexion have changed dramatically. But it is also striking how we are witnessing an updated version of the unionist denial and delusion of 50 years ago and how the capacity to look forward and adapt to changed reality is so compromised by recourse to historic siege tactics. The outward defiance is tempered by understandably deep anxieties, which need to be managed through a process of dialogue rather than a massaging of those fears and falling back on a self-image of persecution that is being wildly exaggerated by unionist leaders as representative of half the population of the North.