WITNESSING the beleaguered residents of the Garvaghy Road being lectured on the merits of the law by assorted DUP dullards over recent days has been like taking a masterclass in hypocrisy.

For this, of course, is the party which knows more about law, and how to break it, than any other political movement in Europe.

These are the people who trace their roots to the fanatical Stormont MP for Woodvale Johnny McQuade, who urged loyalists torching Catholic homes along the Falls in 1969  to "work to rule, boys" — i.e. direct the petrol bombs on homes with doors which had been helpfully marked with an 'X' earlier by their thuggish associates.

Latecomers to legalese, the DUP once counted in their ranks George Seawright who opined at an eighties Belfast City Council committee meeting that parents who objected to the playing of the British national anthem at inter-school concerts were “Fenian scum who are being indoctrinated by the Catholic Church”. He added:  “Taxpayers’ money would be better spent on an incinerator and buring the lot of them. The priests should be thrown in and burnt as well."

Do we have to reference the time that Ian Paisley and his cohorts stormed a political assembly at Stormont, threatening RUC officers reluctantly upholding the Anglo-Irish Agreement with “Don't come crying to me if your homes are attacked, you reap what you sow"?

So, let's not dwell overlong on those who wag their fingers at the proud residents of the Garvaghy Road who are refusing "to bow the head as low as a Larne Catholic", as the ugly old saw has it, and allow the Orange Order to trample down their road and over their rights.

In fact, justice demands that all right-thinking people stand, metaphorically or physically on the Garvaghy Road alongside those who face the threat of violence from the PSNI – because we know this march of shame can only proceed with the use of batons and pepper spray, water cannon and handcuffs.

Let m'learned friends argue the toss about whether the First Minister did or did not act unlawfully by standing with the downtrodden in the pouring rain on the Garvaghy Road on Sunday.

But if she did, she was in good company. Didn't the famed Congressman John Lewis, a hero of the black civil rights movement, break the law the day he led his fellow civil rights campaigners across the bridge at Selma, Alabama, in 1965 — being beaten unconscious by police for his boldness?

And didn't Nobel Peace Laureate John Hume break the law when he twice took to Magilligan Strand, a week before Bloody Sunday in 1972, to march to the prison camp holding internees. For his troubles, he was pummelled by British Paratroopers and arrested (unlawfully as it turned out for British soldiers had no powers of arrest).  So we are entitled to ask today, who are the lawbreakers and who are the peacemakers?

Over the years, the nationalist community has had its fair share of Bible-thumping lectures about lawbreaking from DUP politicians so perhaps it's time they had a riposte from the Good Book. For the Sermon on the Mount tells us “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

And the peacemakers today are the peaceful protesters standing vigil on the Garvaghy Road so that their children and grandchildren should never again have to live through the horrors of second-class citizenship; should never again have to live under the reign of terror which claimed 21 Catholic lives including the brave residents' lawyer Rosemary Nelson; should never again have to dwell in an Orange state.  Hats off, then to the residents of Garvaghy Road – they are standing up not just for their own community but for all of us.