A joint reception for the Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland football teams at Belfast City Hall shouldn't cause controversy.
Yet, depressingly, there'll likely be raised voices and intemperate exchanges when the council discusses a proposal to do just that on Tuesday night.
The two teams have done themselves, and their supporters, proud by qualifying for Euro2016. It's the first time they've done so together and it's under managers who are both from Northern Ireland.
To invite them for canapés and cocktail sausages in the dome of delight should be no big deal. By opposing the proposal, unionist councillors are showing themselves up as petty and paranoid.
With regrettable regularity, they see every gesture reaching across the divide as a Trojan horse that will trick them into a united Ireland.
This motion is proposed not by a republican revolutionary but by Declan Boyle, an SDLP south Belfast councillor.
"This is a genuine and long-overdue attempt at inclusiveness and reconciliation," he said last week. "I'd be surprised if anybody could vote against it." Oh how wrong he was.
The DUP rejected any reception that would involve honouring a foreign team. Ulster Unionist councillor Jim Rodgers questioned the motives behind the motion and said he'd prefer "a reception for the British Isles teams which would include England and Wales".
That's a preposterous proposal. Virtually nobody locally supports those teams. If Jim wants to be ultra-inclusive then he should suggest a reception for the Northern Ireland, Republic, and Poland teams because there are far more Polish supporters here than there are English or Welsh ones.
Unionists have to acknowledge that Belfast is a divided city and that, no matter how much they wish it wasn't so, tens of thousands of its citizens support the Republic. Those people are rate-payers and hosting a reception for Martin O'Neill and his men would prove that City Hall is truly a shared space.
If the door is slammed in the face to a Republic of Ireland team under Martin O'Neill, then I despair.
O'Neill played for Northern Ireland from 1971 to 1984 at a time when it was deeply unpopular to do so within his own community and when Catholic players got a rough ride from many of the team's supporters.
"While we had a wonderful camaraderie, I used to joke with Sammy McIlroy about games played at Windsor Park. I'd say that I didn't mind being booed off the pitch, it was when you were booed onto it that you might have a concern," O'Neill joked.
Still, Martin persevered. As captain, he took the team as far as the quarter finals of the 1982 World Cup. All this from a man who grew up with a picture of Padraig Pearse on the living-room wall of his family home in a republican area of Co Derry.
As a club manager in England, Martin wore his poppy without fail every year and in 2003 he accepted an OBE (that's Order of the British Empire, for any unionists not getting the point).
Martin O'Neill and his team aren't a threat to the union. I'm quite sure the constitutional question rarely even enters their heads.
When a reception for the Northern Ireland team was proposed last month, nationalist councillors didn't hesitate in supporting and attending the event. It is not too late for unionists to rise to the occasion and show the same good grace.
