THE PSNI are getting awful stick over the advice they supplied that enabled the Parades Commission to give the Orange march down the Garvaghy Road the green light.
But it’s very complex and nuanced, as people like to say these days, and this excerpt hopefully gives a more rounded view of the Trevors’ thoughts on getting the Orange down (or is it up?) the Garvaghy…
It is the considered opinion of the PSNI that enabling 35 Orangemen to walk the Garvaghy Road would be a piece of cake, given the changed circumstances.
Almost 30 years have passed since the last unrest on the road, which means that all of the local young people have no memory of how we battered residents – sorry, removed residents – from the road. So given that most of the military-age men – sorry, young people – didn’t see people getting their heads cracked with a baton or taking a plastic bullet in the kisser, our assessment is they will stay in the house bingeing on TikTok and Insta should we decide to escort the Brethren along the road.
As for the older residents, it is our assessment that since they are overwhelmingly devout Roman Catholics they will be too busy with Catholicky things on Sunday to bother coming out and giving us grief.
Given the overwhelmingly Protestant nature of our organisation, we’ve been unable to find a practising Catholic to supply us with insights into Romish Sunday habits, but it’s common knowledge that most of their day is spent either saying repeated decades of the Rosary or dusting statues of the Virgin Mary and pictures of the Sacred Heart.
It is therefore the PSNI’s assessment that an Orange march down the Garvaghy Road is no longer a problem, given the passage of time and the passing of key individuals from the 90s (most of them killed by the UVF).
Illegal assembly is a Loyal Ulster tradition
WHEN did unionists suddenly become so passionately opposed to illegal assembly?
Squinter asks because if illegal assembly was in the Winter Olympics Loyal Ulster would be Norway. Partition was introduced off the back of mass illegal assemblies and this gerrymandered little statelet has been succoured and sustained by regular displays of illegal assembly. Catholics were expelled from the shipyard, the ropeworks and Mackies and anywhere else that men were paid more than a feg butt a day in very focused bouts of illegal assembly. The pogroms carried out in every decade since involved Homeric acts of illegal assembly. Summer in Loyal Ulster, with its racist and sectarian bonfires, its mob attacks on black and brown people and its paramilitary banner-filled parades is one, long, sunny illegal assembly.
THE ORIGINAL AND BEST: A UVF training camp in 1914 in the early days of Loyal Ulster’s long-term love affair with illegal assemblies
Ian Paisley’s life was one devoted to preaching the word of God and taking part in illegal assemblies. One of the most celebrated acts of illegal assembly in the history of unionism was the 1986 invasion of the County Monaghan town of Clontibret by a mob of loyalists including one Peter ‘The Punt’ Robinson Esq.
Two ways of looking at it, Squinter supposes. The first is that when unionists talk about illegal assembly, as they have been doing loudly and persistently about Michelle O’Neill and Claire Hanna’s visit to Garvaghy on Sunday, you’ve got to give them credit for knowing their subject inside-out. The second is that Loyal Ulster getting upset about somebody standing on a road is like Fred West getting upset about a subsiding patio.
Things have got so bad-tempered that there’s widespread talk about pulling down the political institutions, but since standing in the middle of a road here without permission is a summary offence only, it seems a bit much to throw a question mark over the peace process over an alleged offence which is on the same level of seriousness as not wearing a seatbelt. And since Garvaghy hasn’t been sorted yet, we don’t know who’s going to end up with the worse case of political whiplash.
