I COULDN’T care less if Moygashel wants to pay tribute to one of the UDR men who slaughtered the Miami Showband.
Well, that’s not entirely true...
I think it’s horrible and I’d rather it didn’t happen, just as Loyal Ulster thinks republicans commemorating people they don’t like is horrible and shouldn’t happen. But I know things like this have always happened and will always happen, and me giving off about people commemorating people they respect, admire and even love means about as much as me giving off about the weather: It makes for interesting conversation, but it doesn’t change a thing.
So perhaps rather than say I don’t care it would be more accurate to say that if people want to hold a commemoration event for somebody I don’t much care for, then as long as the majority of people in the area in which it’s being held are for it, or at least are willing to put up with it, then I’m happy to let them get on with it.
Well, not exactly happy…
But wait, the cry goes up from the stout-hearted sentries on the union ramparts, weren’t you THAT GUY? Weren’t you the one giving off about the Brian Robinson parade on the Shankill? Weren’t you the one giving off about the Rising Sons of Lenny Murphy’s Madder Cousin at Armed Forces Day? Why, yes, comes the answer, that was indeed me. Aha, comes the rejoinder, but since you never give off about republicans that makes you a thundering hypocrite.
Which is to ignore what it is that renders my parade prose purple. When I share with the world my mild disappointment, righteous indignation, pompous disapproval or thundering denunciation (as appropriate), that’s not aimed at the spectator in the Rangers shirt alternately necking Buckie and vaping like mad while swaying his shoulders to the beat of the drum; it’s not intended for the flute guy in the milkman’s uniform doing The Famine is Over in C minor. Those gentlemen belong to my aforementioned cohort who can go about their business without fear of Andytown News censure (which has never been known to get anybody barred from the Flag and Flute, by the way).
My indictments are for those who spend their termtime weekdays in the Stormont or council chamber venting their spleen about Michelle O’Neill at an IRA commemoration in Co Tyrone and their summer weekends taking part in loyal order marches alongside the Glenanne Gang Young. Protestant Defenders Flute Band, and marching under banners featuring the smiling face of some UDA brigadier who laid down his life for Ulster in the Great Drug Turf War of 1992. My indictments are for those print and broadcast media outlets whose fury about the Wolfe Tones in the park is boundless, but who less than a month earlier gave us extensive full-colour coverage of Twelfth marches which feature UDA and UVF bands.
What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to keep pretending that this MLA who yesterday was demanding new legislation to put Shinners in jail for attending commemorations didn’t know who he/she was marching behind or in front of in a marching season parade? Are we supposed to collude in the conceit that the councillor who wants to ban IRA commemorations has nothing to do with the UVF band 50 feet behind him/her? The same people who want Féile to go out of business for a single song at the end of a jam-packed 10-day series of events expect us to believe that they have no connection to a band singing about being up to their knees in Fenian blood 50 feet in front of them?
Last year I stood at the junction of the Lisburn Road and Bradbury Place on the Twelfth and watched the big parade go by. The Sandy Row crowd was three-deep on the pavement, boisterous and extremely well-lubricated. It’s a disconcerting enough experience to watch well-known unionist politicians walk through the drunken chaos, immaculately turned-out in their suits and white gloves as if they were strolling up a church path on their way to Sunday morning service. But when they are sandwiched between bands named in honour of dead UVF psychos and UDA drug lords, it’s hard to take them seriously when you later hear them on the radio bemoaning the insensitivity and inhumanity of republican parades. The comic value is diminished by the regularity.
The hypocrisy is certainly prima and it’s definitely facie, so much so that it’s unmissable even to people who have made careers out of missing things. The sensible thing to do, one would think – the easy thing, even – would be to shrug as most do and figure that disapproval will never trump human instinct. But as the days of the union tick down like the big neon numbers on an action-movie bomb, the imperative for the unscandalised to act scandalised becomes more pressing. The Irish language, Casement Park, Féile, statues, universities, commemor-ations: All piñatas to be whacked so loudly and hard that the ticking of those neon numbers can’t be heard.
