THE resignation of PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne on Monday was an inevitability given the pressures mounting on him since last week’s High Court decision on the disciplining of two officers after the February 2021 Sean Graham commemoration incident.

Ultimately, his fate was a deserved one because his four-year reign has been marked by misstep after misstep. Ironically, the controversy that did for him in the end was not in and of itself a resigning matter – rather it was a convoluted HR issue much of whose urgency and relevance has been created by unionist opportunism.

In the High Court ruling outlining the confused sequence of events after the ludicrous decision to intervene was made, Mr Justice Scoffield made reference to nationalist political anger at the incident and in particular the reaction of Sinn Féin in its dealings with the Chief Constable. And in that aspect of the decision the three main unionist parties saw the chance of a double whammy: Presenting themselves as the guardians of decent policing and turning the spotlight on Sinn Féin. It was a chance they took with both hands. Throw in the added benefit for the DUP of distracting from their continued refusal to get back to work during an unprecedented economic crisis and the court finding became manna from heaven.

The issue has dominated the headlines for the better part of a fortnight now, which is an unusually lengthy run for any story, but when we consider the fact that as we approach the second week of breathless coverage we are no clearer about what was said by whom, the entire episode becomes distinctly confusing.

Needless to say, the searing context in which the Ormeau incident occurred has been stripped from the monochrome narrative of ‘young cops thrown to the wolves’, ‘aggressive crowd’ and ‘Sinn Féin puppetmasters’. The decision to intervene in a solemn, annual massacre commemoration with emotions sky-high – whatever excuses were later bandied about – was quite clearly a disastrous one and would have provoked a robust reaction at any time. But when it happened three days after the PSNI were roundly criticised by nationalist Ireland for standing back and allowing a 40-strong crowd of masked, black-clad UVF men to take over an area of East Belfast while the PSNI stood and watched, the Ormeau intervention quite naturally provoked into a storm of criticism.

In policing terms, the Pitt Park incident was objectively the bigger failure by a country mile, but here we find ourselves – bombarded by unionist talking points on an issue that remains as clear as ditchwater heading towards a fortnight after the High Court decision. The baying pack is now in full pursuit of Mr Byrne’s deputy,  Mark Hamilton, which means that we’re almost certainly in for a third week of performative sturm und drang – and that’s a depressingly familiar picture across the board in the North.