ARLENE Foster's had enough of the glorification of terrorism. Speaking recently in the House of Lords after members had risen from their afternoon nap, the former First Minister said Sinn Féin First Minister Michelle O'Neill's appearance at a Magherafelt commemoration in January for three IRA volunteers “should be a matter the Security Minister should delve into.” She went on: “A change in the law is required to deal with those in authority who continue to exalt and deify terrorists who caused so much hurt and pain.”
Meanwhile, DUP spokesman on sport Stephen Dunne said last year that the GAA has “a long road to travel in building a relationship with unionists”. He added: “The organisation is not purely a sporting body. It has a political aspiration of a 32-county state. There is also the fact that some GAA clubs and some GAA competitions are named after republican terrorists. This is incredible in 2024, and it’s unacceptable.” He was speaking on, ah, July 11th.
The current Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly said of Féile an Phobail after “Ooh, ah, up the Ra” chants at the Wolfe Tones finale concert in 2022: “Central to many grant awards is a commitment to good relations. This festival has set good relations back decades for tens of thousands of teenagers. Rather than moving Northern Ireland forward, this festival is dragging us backwards.” She added that she would be writing to all of Féile’s “known sponsors and partner organisations” about the chants, and presumably not to urge them to give West Belfast a bit more.
For his part, Orange Order Grand Secretary Mervyn Gibson told Newstalk last year he finds the naming of GAA grounds after “IRA terrorists” “totally repulsive”.
In summation: Loyal Ulster doesn’t much like republican commemorations. It doesn’t much like the GAA either. And it doesn’t much like Féile an Phobail. But not liking them isn’t enough. Loyal Ulster would like the people involved with the things they don’t like to have their collars felt; and Loyal Ulster would like things it doesn’t like to get less money – or none.
Unionism of the staunch stripe isn’t going to lose a vote from wanging on about the Ra, the GAA and Féile an Phobail. (Throw the Irish language in there too, since this week Councillor Sarah Bunting, leader of the DUP group on Belfast City Council, said she’s not only opposed to Irish being included on street signs in certain parts of the city – she’s against residents in those streets being asked about Irish on street signs.) Marks and Spencer unionists fed up with ceaseless culture wars whingeing plumped some time ago for the Alliance Party or the sofa. What’s left for the DUP is a diminished but committed constituency to whom high-conflict politics is not a choice, but a mild addiction. Candy Crush with flags, flutes and fury. But if the price to be paid for this grimly predictable daily tableau is no longer electoral, unionists should be aware that there is a piper still to be paid – and it’s an Irish rather than a Highland one.
The Protestant, unionist and loyalist community is considerably more vulnerable on its cultural flanks than those that the DUP spends all its time giving off about. You can like the Twelfth of July and I can dislike it. That guy can love Eleventh Night bonfires and that guy can hate it. That woman may spend the entire year looking forward to her favourite march and this woman may spend all year trying to get that march banned. But money doesn’t take sides and the money has decided that – and there’s no sugar-coating this – it absolutely despises the Orange Order, marching bands and bonfires. And the money has decided – in the face of annual demands for it to go elsewhere – that it loves the GAA and Féile.
Ask yourself when’s the last time you saw a blue chip company sponsoring the Twelfth. Take a second to think about why marching bands have their flutes and milkman uniforms paid by bucket collections and – oh, happy few – the Department of Communities. Ponder for a moment the grim reality that bonfire night is today as feral, chaotic and unencumbered by corporate interest as it ever was.
Emma Little-Pengelly can write to as many Féile firms and sponsors as she likes, it's been tried annually by others since the August jamboree began, but the banks and drinks companies will again this year queue up to get their names on the three-inch thick glossy programme. Stephen Dunne can bemoan the names Roger Casement, Bobby Sands and Sam Maguire all he wants, but it makes absolutely zero difference to the firms keen to match logos with the GAA.
So no votes to be lost – or at least not many – for hardline unionism in picking at the inflamed identity scab; no corporate cash to be lost if the bands and bonfires are regulated by the future anti-paramilitaries protocol senior unionists tell us they dream of. But if the DUP, the TUV and to a lesser extent the UUP think that censuring the memorialisation of paramilitaries is a consequence-free activity, if they think that only Shinners will be caught in the bear trap of criminalising tributes to non-state fighters, then a bit of due diligence is urgently required.
I’ve been to probably a dozen Twelfth parades. I’ve lost count of how many smaller local parades have been graced – or perhaps disgraced – by my presence. I’ve been to Scarva five or six times, the July 1 Somme Parade twice, I did a picture special on the 2012 Ulster Covenant centenary parade. And what they all had and have in common is the commemoration of violent loyalism. The exploits of this UDA gunman or that UVF bomber are celebrated on drum skins, banners, polo shirts and cap badges; the derring-do of Catholic-killers and Taig-slashers is lauded in chant and song. And, more pertinently, what they have in common is that traipsing in the wake of these UVF/UDA bands in their sashes, white gloves and lily buttonholes are unionist elected representatives who are also Orangemen.
PREDICTABLE: Chanting at the Wolfe Tones Féile concert leads to annual complaints to sponsors
Does anyone really think that if Michelle O’Neill is marched into the back of a Land Rover over her participation in a future Magherafelt event that elected unionist reps at parades with bands professing public admiration for sectarian killer gangs will continue to get a free pass? On the Twelfth, the BBC, UTV and the unionist newspapers’ full-colour parade supplements evince zero interest in the role played by paramilitary-supporting bands – it is a reality subject to a rigid Loyal Ulster journalistic omertà. Ice-cream, soft drinks, selfies, plastic union jack cowboy hats in; banner images of self-styled brigadiers and soi-disant patriots out. But if righteous indignation over the sight of Shinners at IRA memorials leads to legislating on memorials, the quaint diffidence displayed by Belfast newsrooms on the make-up of loyal parades will not be shared by m’learned friends in private or public employ.
And if official grants for Féile or the GAA in future become dependent on the axing of certain names and the disappearing of certain songs and chants, who’s dense enough to suppose that the Arts Council will continue to pay for instruments for the Pride of Lenny Murphy’s Madder Mate?
