CHIEF Constable Jon Boutcher wants Catholics to head on over to Shaftesbury Square next July 12th and enjoy watching a parade they're not allowed to take part in.
Yes, I'm fully aware that that is a hell of a sentence that I've just written. And yes, on the face of it it seems comical and absurd. But, look, l didn't get him to say the things he said. He came out and said them without speaking to me. Not that he ever has, but sure we live in hope.
Addressing the Policing Board about the disturbances in Derry after the recent Apprentice Boys end-of-August parade, when petrol bombs were thrown by republican youths at his officers, Mr Boutcher said: “We have to decide what sort of society we want in Northern Ireland. The history of parades and tradition in Northern Ireland should be something that we celebrate, it should be a catalyst for bringing communities together, not separating them.
FLASHPOINT: Youths hurl petrol bombs at police after a recent Apprentice Boys parade in Derry
“It should be something that’s celebrated worldwide, it should bring in enormous tourism. And these events are something that prevent all of that from happening.”
So to sum up. If it wasn't for Dissies getting kids to attack the police, the Eleventh Night bonfires would be a global phenomenon on a par with the New Orleans Mardi Gras or the Burning Man festival in Nevada; Japanese tourists would outnumber loyalist residents as they pointed their expensive cameras at drunk people falling off the bonfires or the racist threats on bedsheets draped across the structures.
And if it wasn't for the people of Ardoyne and the Garvaghy Road causing trouble every year, baseball-capped Yanks would mingle happily with Buckfast-swigging 12th revellers to belt out the Beach Boys' hit The Famine Song and French tourists would gasp "Formidable!" as they watched another wall of steel go up around the Short Strand.
Look, I'm not joking, I could go on making lame jokes like these for another 5,000 words. But what's the point when we've all got the point? When Boutcher's hapless predecessor Simon Byrne did his Robocop cosplay outside Crossmaglen for a 2020 Christmas card to show off to his wide-eyed English colleagues, his credibility wasn't just shot to bits, it was riddled with PSNI-issue gas-operated Heckler and Koch G36 battle rifles equipped with extended box magazines and high-powered telescopic sights. In other words, it was vanity that did for Byrne – an understandable human failing of which we're all guilty to a greater or lesser extent.
But Boutcher's words were just buck stupid. They were so sphincter-clenchingly, fist-bitingly thick that one can only wonder if the interview panel that appointed him had been at an office party the night before. Because when it comes to loyal order parades, even the most unreconstructed optimist can only hope for a fragile rapprochement where marches are tolerated by the local Catholic populace rather than welcomed, or if Boutcher's dream comes true, celebrated. And while the Derry Apprentice Boys parade which the Chief Constable was referencing when he suffered his attack of intellectual diarrhoea may be held up as an example of exactly such a delicate agreement, in recent years the behaviour of bands and their followers have suggested that the event is far from a settled fixture in the Derry cultural calendar. Indeed, every year the city becomes more suspicious of it.
Ever since I was a child I've heard unionists put forward what we might call the Tavares argument: "It only takes a minute." Stay in your homes, polish your rosary beads, kiss a statue's feet or whatever it is that you Taigs do in private, and before you know it we'll be gone. As an argument, it's rather like telling somebody upon whom you're about to piss that it's actually quite warm for a few seconds. But Boutcher went beyond that. He doesn't envisage Catholics bolting the front door, pulling the curtains and turning the TV up – he envisages them rushing out into the street and throwing themselves headlong into celebrations of this great Reformation Nation.
"The history of parades and tradition in Northern Ireland should be something that we celebrate, it should be a catalyst for bringing communities together, not separating them," Boutcher said. There's not a chance that our Chief Constable is unacquainted with the Orange Order origin story of Dan Winter's cottage and the 1795 shooting to death of 30 Papists. How Catholics are supposed to celebrate the murder of their co-religionists is not entirely clear to me, although perhaps Mr Boutcher has given it a bit of thought. And in terms of more recent history and tradition, what Catholics out celebrating the 12th are supposed to do when bands march past carrying banners of UVF and UDA heroes and singing about being up to their necks (or is it knees?) in Fenian blood is again something that I struggle to imagine. Say your great-uncle was shot dead in his bed by Pliers McCooey, but you've managed to please the Chief Constable by making the 12th a day out for you and your family. Do you avert your gaze when the Pliers banner hoves into view? Or do you go the extra mile and give it a tearful and forgiving salute?
So nuts were Boutcher's words that you wouldn't hear them said at a Corrymeela barbecue after a few tipsy verses of Kumbaya. Even the most ardent Getalongerist appreciates that Catholics and parades which ban Catholics from participating are irreconcilable. The Chief Constable can if he so chooses, like the alchemists of the Middle Ages who toiled over base metal in an attempt to turn it into gold, keep searching for a formula that would defy physics and allow Orange oil and holy water to mix. But no matter how enthusiastically he points the way, Catholics aren't going down the Boutcher Road. And if he keeps trying to make them, it's only going to distract him from his main task of falling out with the Justice Minister.
