I’M not easily shocked. How could I be? I’ve been at this job for all these decades and I’m still here. If I was easily shocked I’d be in a secure facility or shearing sheep in Donegal.
But I’ve just heard the Parades Commission decision on Garvaghy and I don’t think I’ve ever been as shocked in my life – personal and professional.
We can speculate all we like about why this reversal has come about and it would be just that – speculation. My speculation, for what it’s worth, is that the reversal came about as a result of the Parades Commission desperately wanting to keep their jobs and the British government desperately wanting to keep the Parades Commission. A perfect storm of cynicism, although they'd probably call it realpolitik. But the only ones who are going to feel the force of this era-defining reversal are the blameless people of the Garvaghy Road – a huge number of them too young to remember the hatred and the murder and threats and the violence of the late-90s.
I told myself during the worst years of this disastrous social and political experiment that some people call a country that at least it’s not as bad as what my mother and father experienced. I told myself that in my job as an Andersonstown News journalist I’d contributed modestly to bringing about a society that they wouldn’t recognise. And it gave me some comfort. When I think of the raw discrimination they faced; when I think of the child that they saw killed by the British army; when I think of a dozen of us in a two-bedroom hovel at the back of Roden Street barracks I tell myself that I never experienced the naked bigotry and hate that were their lot in life – and the lot of their parents before them.
But for all my decades of experience, for all my familiarity with human weakness and stupidity, I never thought that what we have achieved and the distance we have travelled could be thrown to the kerb with such a jawdropping lack of care.
Now it begins again – the madness that I witnessed personally. And it begins now because it takes a lot of time and effort to block the Garvaghy Road off from the people who live there. Those metal barriers can’t just be put up and left or else they’d be ripped down. It takes a lot of police to keep those barriers up. It takes a lot of effort to put up barbed wire and reverse large, clanging, whining vehicles belching diesel fumes strategically into place. Stopping a single Catholic from accessing 1.5km of road is a heck of job.
It's a hell of a bigger job than taking a fake mosque down from the top of a bonfire. But our 70 per cent Protestant police force refused to do that because the Protestant boney-builders might kick off. It takes a hell of a lot more effort to turn an entire community into a weekend concentration camp than it does to stop a Protestant asbestos bonfire from being burned. But that went ahead because – altogether now – our 70 per cent Protestant police said it would cause too much trouble. Too much trouble? Welcome to the weekend, Chief Constable.
For a police force that is so clearly and provably trouble-averse, the PSNI has been remarkably sanguine about the job from hell they’ve just been handed. Had Chief Constable Jon Boutcher told the Parades Commission that he doesn’t have the capacity or the ability (let’s leave aside the will for now) to place Garvaghy under siege again there is not a chance the Parades Commission would have taken the decision they just have. Be in no doubt: This decision has come about because the Parades Commission have been assured that it is indeed possible to intern tens of thousands of innocent people behind a wall of steel and guns to let 30 Protestants walk where they don’t live.
I haven’t changed my mind on the core argument that I’ve been making: The PSNI, even with British bobbies in reserve, is not capable of blocking off the Garvaghy Road without the consent of its people. It is a majority-Protestant force that is permanently mired in controversy and error; a force lacking in the most basic strategic and practical nous; a force that for years has been a magnet for negative headlines. Those 100 officers from Scotland that the Parades Commission determination has told us are on their way will be as useful as wheelie bins if they are not supervised; the trouble is that they are to be supervised by a force which has shown itself over and over again to be incapable of supervising itself. If I throw in the PSNI’s chronic lack of officers and resources and if I picture the scene at Drumcree all those years ago, I'm at a complete loss to see how a force which says it can’t police kids with pallets is going to re-enact the battlefield scenes of the late-90s. 100 cops from Scotland, we're told. Catholic cops, I can only presume; unarmed to boot. 100 cops from Scotland with truncheons won’t be able to cordon off the Garvaghy Road SuperValu.
But the PSNI is intent on giving it a go despite the awesome challenge they face and despite the fact that they have, as we've seen, run a mile from modest challenges. The Chief Constable will have to wait until next week to assess the key performance indicators of his Gold Command team, but experience must tell him – as it tells the rest of us – not to keep his expectations low.
Jon Boutcher doesn’t know either how the people of the Garvaghy Road are going to react, but whatever they decide to do they have my support. The way I figure it, if the Parades Commission, the British government and the PSNI don’t give a bollocks about 28 years of unbroken peace on the Garvaghy Road then they can’t get too squeamish if and when the people of the Garvaghy Road decide that peace is in fact worth giving a bollocks for.
I don’t live on the Garvaghy Road, I live in Belfast. But I can tell you that if somebody told me today that a parade that brought death and division is to be allowed past my house I wouldn’t be having it. If somebody told me that my children, who have either never seen that death and division or were too small to understand it, are to have it forced upon them, I’d be telling them that I’d have something – quite a lot of something, actually – to say about it.
In Portadown, it's not over till the fat man sings the Sash. M’learned friends are having their say as we speak. Sinn Féin and the SDLP will certainly have their input – and that input will inevitably involve some very serious thinking about the point of Stormont. But whatever happens in the next couple of days. Garvaghy will have its say.
Here we stand, the Orangemen are fond of saying about Drumcree, we can do no other. The truth, of course is, that there is plenty other they can do – go away round their own doors and leave the local Catholics alone, for one thing. For their part, the people of the Garvaghy Road quite literally can do no other than live where they live. My mother and father used to think that living involved keeping quiet and staying in the house when you’re told, but later in their lives they learned that that didn’t have to be how it was. The people of Garvaghy Road have learned that lesson too.
They have two choices when the barriers and armoured vehicles arrive in the hours and days to come: They can do what they’re told by the men with the guns and the barbed wire – the vast majority Protestant, as are all of the men they’re there to clear the way for – or they can stand up where they live; stand up for what is right.
For what little it means, I’ll be standing with them.
