Drumcree exposes depth of unionist alienation, anger

"WHAT the hell makes those mad bastards of Orangemen tick, bringing Northern Ireland to the brink of civil war over a march along a few hundred yards of road through a Catholic area?" was a not untypical comment in Dublin in the past week.

It was a question few bothered to try and answer, particularly in the atmosphere of nationalist outrage following the RUC's sudden reversal of its original decision to ban the march.

However, the reasons an obscure Orange church parade in a mid-Ulster town became a potentially catastrophic flashpoint are important for nationalists to understand if the peace process is to be restored.

For in unionist eyes, Drumcree was only the painful, about-to-erupt boil on a unionist body politic already inflamed by fears about the ultimate destination of that process. For a people whose politics has deep and enduring roots in an anti-Catholic, anti-nationalist siege mentality, its symbolism was important.

Portadown was the scene of the most commemorated massacre of Protestants during the 1641 Catholic uprising. The Orange Order was formed 201 years ago after the sectarian Battle of the Diamond a few miles west of the town. The Portadown Orange lodges were the first to form into a district, and the first recorded parade to the church at Drumcree was in 1807.

In 1913, the unionist and Orange leader, Cot Saunderson, told Lloyd George that he might be able to pass the Home Rule Bill through the Houses of Parliament, but "it will not pass the bridge at Portadown".

The unionist historian and Ulster Society chairman, Gordon Lucy, himself an Orangeman, said there was "a perception that if Orangeism lost this particular battle in the heartland of Orangeism, routes all over Northern Ireland would come under attack".

THIS sense of unionism, and its most popular public manifestation - Orange parades - being under extreme pressure has been heightened by over a quarter of a century of IRA violence and perceived British betrayal.

"You don't have to be a committed unionist to find quite plausible an account which says that everything the British government has done since 1972 has weakened the union," says Prof Steve Bruce of Aberdeen University, author of authoritative books on unionism, loyalism and Paisleyism.

The unionists' traditional siege mentality has also been exacerbated by the trend over the past 25 years for Protestants to move away from Border areas to the "safe" north-eastern counties of Antrim and north Down, with their unassailable pro-Union majorities. Portadown has been seen for over 350 years as a key "Orange citadel" in northern Protestantism's defence line.

This sense of Protestant "territoriality", utterly alien in settled societies like the Republic and Britain, but commonplace in violently divided regions like the Balkans, goes very deep. In Belfast, unionist councillors will talk privately about how the Catholics have been trying to take over the city for years, and will go to the seemingly absurd extreme of claiming that they have moved into areas commanding those access routes which would be strategically important in the event of a "doomsday" situation. One of the areas frequently mentioned is the Markets and the Lower Ormeau at the bottom of the Ormeau Road.

In this atmosphere of historical threat, martial language and the perceived inevitability of renewed conflict, the symbolism of flags, anthems and parades is centrally important. Portadown Orangemen argue that over the past decade, Dublin-induced RUC bans have reduced the number of their parades in the Drumcree-Tunnel Garvaghy Road area from seven to one. Middle-class unionists in Belfast reacted with concerted outrage last year to Queen's University's decision to drop the British national anthem from graduation ceremonies.

Dominic Bryan, co-author of a recent book on parades in Northern Ireland, says Orange parades are a ritual occasion - perhaps the only ritual occasion - through which ordinary, powerless unionist people can experience a momentary sense of political involvement and power.

In fact, the Orange Order is in rapid decline. The forecasts by unionist politicians that 100,000 Orangemen would descend on Portadown are based on long out-of-date estimates; there are probably little more than half that number of paid-up members these days.

Most middle-class Protestants now see Orange Order membership as beneath them. The debate at last year's Ulster Unionist Party conference about severing the order's links with a modernised, non-sectarian party would have been inconceivable even a few years ago.

One result of the order's relative loss of respectability and its leadership's loss of control is that it is sometimes dependent on "Kick the Pope" bands of tough young non-Orangemen to make up the numbers at parades, with an inevitable increased risk of sectarian violence.

DESPITE this, it is clear that a huge number of non-Orange unionists silently supported the order's right to march this week. Even moderate unionists were voicing their concern that it was the hated London-Dublin alliance, rather than the RUC chief constable, which was calling the shots in Portadown.

This is the perception of betrayal, never far below unionism's surface, which explains the tinderbox atmosphere in so many Protestant areas in recent days. "There is a huge general sense of frustration and nightmare, a feeling that every time the major players - London, Dublin, Washington - make a decision, it's always against the wishes and desires of unionists," says Steve Bruce. "It's not any one decision. It's the cumulative effect of decisions like the Framework Document, the talks starting after the Canary Wharf bomb, the appointment of George Mitchell, the pushing of decommissioning down the agenda, which together reinforce the inchoate unionist impression that they, the majority, are being treated like second class citizens."

The Professor of Politics at Queen's University, Dr Paul Bew, believes that "popular Protestant understanding has an exaggerated notion of how far British government policy is against their interests". But he also thinks that over the past year, the Northern Ireland Office has done far too little, both publicly and privately, to reassure unionists of this.

"The British assumption was that as long as the Provos were unhappy with the pace of the peace process, the unionists would remain calm. That balancing act might have worked had it not been for the existence since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of widespread unionist fears of an imposed settlement, only fuelled by the `secret talks' with republicans in the early 1990s."

An exhausted British government, limping towards an imminent general election, got it wrong. Not for the first time, it failed to foresee the depth of unionist alienation and fury, and the result was the Drumcree crisis and climbdown.