A variety of approaches has been employed to reduce friction and manage tribal instincts but hatred continues to boil over, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
ALMOST JULY, but in Belfast the piles of bonfire material are tidier, rubber tyres less obvious, and bunting and flags seem to have just begun sprouting. Time enough, you might think, isn’t the marching season only due to peak on the 12th?
But the season lasts from spring to autumn. At the last official count there were 2,691 marches by the Orange and other “loyal orders”, but the trouble some bring has eased.
March routes, like flags, can still cause mayhem. Chief constable Sir Hugh Orde, soon to leave Northern Ireland, has been talking of the progress in policing contentious parades by balancing the rights of marchers and those they parade past. His insistence to the Guardian on the benefit to policing of commitment to human rights is presumably meant to signal his approach to his new job as head of the police chiefs association – at a time when policing of demonstrations in England is under harsh scrutiny, in particular after the death of the innocent Ian Tomlinson.
But the Orde era, impressive in many ways, is ending with discordant Northern notes. The judicial finding last week that journalist Suzanne Breen was right to withhold reporting material slapped down the police effort to coerce her. The judge’s rejection of the bizarre argument that she faced no “immediate” threat made Orde’s force look silly, as well as vindictive. And as Roma families fleeing racist attacks in Belfast are flown back home, it is increasingly clear that police failed to protect them.
The made-over police service have enough on their hands as they lose Orde, their chief architect and best advertisement. He must hope the summer gears down now. But Orange parades have raised temperatures and brought destruction and sometimes death for centuries. The fiction that modern Sinn Féin invented resentment of them in the past 20 years will not help unionism to free itself from the legacy of bigotry. Orange marching has been destabilising society and tying up police resources since the end of the 1700s.
In the following century British administrators despaired at the riots they caused. One of many official commissions of inquiry reported that July’s ceremony was used “to remind one party of the triumph of their ancestors over those of the other, and to inculcate the feelings of Protestant superiority over their Roman Catholic neighbours”.
A variety of approaches including a parades commission to adjudicate on routes and monitor behaviour – they attached conditions to 147 contentious marches last year – has reduced friction to manageable proportions.
It no longer tends to overflow into politics, as the poisonous Drumcree confrontations of the 1990s did. Hatred can still boil over.
A loyalist mob used the excuse that Tricolours had been erected in Coleraine last month to rush into Catholic streets, where a group kicked 49-year-old Kevin McDaid to death. This Saturday the dissident republican group éirígí wants supporters to gather at Belfast’s City Hall to oppose the raising of the Union Jack to mark “Armed Forces Day”. (Unionist councillors voted for the flag-raising, which will also happen elsewhere across the North, and the UK.)
In west Belfast a few hours later Orangemen are to parade from a loyalist district into a largely republican one through security gates, the scene of past serious rioting during which loyalists repeatedly fired on police. The parades commission’s restriction on numbers and bands in recent years plus careful policing and stewarding has kept the peace.
But loyalist stewards refuse to perform this year, in protest against the stoning last Friday of a parade past Ardoyne, also scene of much worse violence in the past and also stewarded by republicans, led by Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly.
Kelly blamed dissident republicans for egging on local youths, and said republicans were tiring of helping police unpopular parades.
Martin McGuinness developed the theme by asking the Orange Order to make its own contribution to peace by confining its parades to districts that want them. The Orange Order said he was attacking an essential element of Protestant culture.
Whiterock residents’ spokesman and former IRA prisoner Seán Murray said he’d like to hear an explanation of the logic behind removing loyalist stewards this Saturday. Murray can hardly be accused of rigidity. He is a member of the parading review headed by Sir Paddy Ashdown, whose interim report recommends largely replacing the parades commission remit by locally-negotiated arrangements. The report is on hold.
Moreover, the Orange Order’s efforts to shake off “kick the pope” bands and rebrand the 12th as a tourist attraction hang in the balance.
Incantations about Protestant culture undercut the grace of that apology last week from one Ballymena band for the behaviour of another outside the Catholic church at Harryville, picketed by loyalists 10 years ago. As for éirígí, maybe the imperious name will continue to repel more support than it attracts.