Many, many years ago, not long after I’d come to Glasgow to work, I found myself trapped in the back of a taxi as the Orange Lodge marched past.

The drums seemed never-ending and the pipes grew shriller and shriller as the marchers hip twitched their arrogant route.

The sounds peaked as they were halted and the assault of the drum was not so much on my ears as the very core of my being.

The last time I had been in such a situation had been Belfast on one of my several reporting ventures into the city at the height of the troubles.

Then the ‘walks’ had been used to taunt and goad the Catholics in their ghettoes and violence was always inevitable, as the police looked the other way.

Hatred contorted the features of the men, women and children as they chanted their blood songs in their absurd outfits of gauntlet gloves, sashes and bowler hats; women dressed like parodies of the Queen Mother.

Now, in the taxi, in a city then as forbidding as Belfast in its way, I found myself almost cowering; the acrid taste of fear once more in my mouth and I started to shake, not stopping until the cab at last sped away.

Unless you are a Catholic you cannot imagine how deeply personal this is. How each boom of that drum vibrates the very soul. This was my Fenian blood they, for now, symbolically, wished to wash in.

In time I learned to laugh at them but carefully avoided seeing or hearing them. And much later, if I thought of them at all, it was as a relic of another era, a grotesque tradition founded on the hatred and pursuit of Catholics.

Until recently I had ceased to think of them at all. And then, there in my Scottish on line reading, they were before me in all their awful ‘majesty.’

A Catholic priest was spat on and threatened with a pole; his parishioners jeered at and intimidated. I tasted the bile once more rising to my throat.

At least, in these times, condemnation was swift and action will be taken, but now the argument swirls about banning the annual walks and the defence of freedom to do so.

There is nothing remotely similar in France even with its bloody history of Protestant/Catholic/Cathar persecution.

Centuries of religious wars and pogroms.

Reduced to the pages of history and historical novels, the numerous sites of siege, burnings, torture and interment are now the fabled cities that draw millions of visitors annually.

We live in a land where religion and state are separated by law and that separation has been jealously guarded since it was formalised in 1905.

That separation was brutal as Catholic schools were closed, chaplains removed, and money from state to Church buildings and priests’ coffers was stopped.

Schools became strictly secular and latterly all outward forms of religious attachment, crosses and veils in particular, are not permitted within their walls.

And yet….our public holidays are all named Holy Days; the Angelus Bell still rings out in our fields; statues of Our Lady, arms held out in plea, still stand on their podiums outside schools and occasionally, in shaded squares.

Twenty per cent of schools are private – the majority Catholic. Here religious education can be given as a lesson but the daily all embracing faith is absent.

In a country with the largest Muslim and Jewish population in Europe, still 80 per cent of the French would describe themselves as Catholic.

But the empty churches show that for many it is in name only.

Recently our own newspapers erupted with anti-Catholic rhetoric not heard since the division.

President Macron delivered a speech to Bishops and more than 400 Catholic leaders in which he actively encouraged French Catholics to participate in French life as….Catholics.

To use their Church’s three great gifts – wisdom, engagement and the freedom to speak of Universal truths.

Social media, commentators and TV and radio programmes argued and debated whether he had breached the conventions surrounding State and Church.

But, apart from the usual rabid anonymous comments and far-Left denouncement, the debates, while fierce, were intellectual; referencing only immediate past and present.

For France has long moved on from any residual trace hatred of Catholics and its Catholics have long accepted their place in this secular society.

I thought of those debates as I watched footage of the Orange Order in action in their reclaiming of Scottish streets in the name of a ‘victory’ in another land hundreds of years ago.

Whereas here, in debate, words are used as elegant tools to form the argument, there drums are used as crude weapons of intimidation.

The Lodge’s rough logic to defend the indefensible holds no sway with me – it is too basic, too ignorant, and too ridiculous to waste time on.

But the drums, the pipes and the message they pound and thrill out do. That’s personal and even thousands of miles away I hear what they’re saying.

I never want to hear it again. Ban them.