LOYAL Ulster is getting more and more vocal these days about the pressing need to stop the promotion of terrorism.
The appearance of politicians at memorials for dead paramilitaries has been the cause of much angst among the Stauncherati for some time, but of late the need to do something about it has become increasingly urgent. That is, the need to do something about the attendance of nationalist and republicans at memorials for dead paramilitaries; the other side of that coin remains stubbornly face-down.
They say be careful what you wish for, and never was that particular maxim more true than in the case of those unionists who emote frequently and movingly on the need to stop public displays of support for terrorism, which in Westminster is singularly defined, of course, as non-state violence.
I don’t know what form future legislation will take if and when Loyal Ulster gets its wish and the glorification of terrorism is banned, since support for and promotion of illegal organisations is already prosecutable. But if we stick with the narrow Westminster definition and exclude the actions of the state and its various arms from the terrorism matrix, we’re left with legislation that will be aimed at not just the IRA and the smaller satellite republican groups, but also at the UVF and the UDA.
So even if we don’t know even in the roughest of outline form how the law will be framed or how it will be implemented, we know that it will not apply only to those that First Minister Michelle O’Neill occasionally pays tribute to. It will apply to displays of support and expressions of admiration right across the board. And while those who hold the union close to their hearts will not want to hear it, the most frequent and public displays of terrorist glorification, the most ardent and committed expressions of terrorist support come not at windswept graveyards in East Tyrone or redbrick gardens of remembrance in the housing estates of Belfast and Derry, they come relentlessly and unceasingly in the torrent of loyalist parades which makes up the six-month-long marching season.
Anyone familiar with my oeuvre from the past four decades will know that I know my way around a loyal parade. I’ve been to a goodly number of Twelfth of July parades in Belfast, and a handful outside the city. I’ve been to countless smaller parades in the greater Belfast area and I’ve been to the Scarva sham fight three times. And what I can tell you without fear of contradiction is that I’ve never been at a loyal parade – Orange Order, Apprentice Boys, big, small, middling – that didn’t feature glorification of and support for loyalist terrorism. Never once. You’ve got your bog-standard UVF and UDA bands that are quite literally named after dead paramilitaries. You’ve got the much larger number of bands who spend large parts of the marching season at UVF and UDA commemorations. You’ve got your generic UDA and UVF flags. You’ve got your standard tunes (Billy Boys, No Pope of Rome, The Famine Song etc) promoting the anti-Catholic sectarianism that fuelled the UVF and UDA. You don’t have to take my word for it, all you need to do – after you’ve done the recommended Parades Commission check – is take a look at the loyalist band scene on Facebook.
And just as I’ve seen these bands at loyalist marches, I’ve seen well-known unionist politicians in their collarettes and white gloves marching in them too, their lodge perhaps a hundred metres behind the Rising Sons of Lenny Murphy’s Madder Cousin; or fifty metres in front of John ‘Grugg’ Gregg Young Protestant Defenders.
Perhaps someone less literal than me can explain what the difference is between unionist politicians spectating at or participating in these parades and republican politicians standing at a memorial in South Armagh. For the life of me, I can’t see it.
Since supporting illegal terrorist organisations is already illegal, the framing of any new legislation will need to be imaginative, to say the least. But there is nothing that the imagination of humanity can devise that will produce a law that comes down hard on Sinn Féin attending IRA commemorations and not on unionists attending marches that commemorate the UVF and UDA.
Perhaps Loyal Ulster spots a crack to which they can apply a small screwdriver and then a crowbar, a crack like this perhaps: The events attended by Sinn Féin politicians are bespoke events with the sole purpose of glorifying terrorists; the parades attended and participated in by unionist politicians are wider cultural events to which, unhappily, certain bands attach themselves.
At first blush, this may seem arguable, or even reasonable; but on closer examination it becomes clear that a barrister with a moderately functioning frontal lobe would take that argument apart before lunch, utterly reliant, as it is, on the contention that most of the parade wasn’t illegal. That’s the jurisprudential equivalent of asking for a speeding ticket to be revoked because your car was taxed, insured and had a valid MOT.
Let’s give the brethren the respect they’re due by cutting out the frippery and speaking in plain Ulster language: Every single person who spectates or marches on the Twelfth, the Sham Fight or Easter Monday in Derry knows that they are attending events where tributes to the UVF and UDA will take place. And each person will fashion their own accommodation with that plain fact:
• I just ignore them and enjoy the colour and the music. (Except the UVF/UDA colour and music, obvs.)
• Why tar an entire event with the paramilitary brush? (I mean, come on – it’s not as if we do it with SF and the Ra.)
• How am I supposed to know who’s going to be there? These are big events. (I have been remarkably unobservant in the past during parades.)
• It’s not Loyal Ulster’s fault if these bands piggy-back on our parades. (Although of course they are cleared by and registered with whatever loyal organisation’s name is on the parade.)
And those excuses will continue to be rolled out, except by the vanishingly few unionists willing to admit that PUL culture has a paramilitary-shaped problem. And that problem is not that UVF and UDA bands attend the parades, that problem is that those who never miss an opportunity to wail passionately about those guys over there refuse to accept for a second that their right to moralise on the subject is even touched – never mind compromised – by their own cultural affiliations.
