IF Paddy Power was laying a book on the imminent Parades Commission decision on the Orange Order’s latest application to march along the Garvaghy Road it is likely the company would have paid out early by now.
Quite simply, it is inconceivable to the most casual observer of Irish politics that the parades body will throw away nearly 30 years of peace in North Armagh on the back of a court ruling on Parades Commission processes instituted by people who are quite brazenly open about their desire to use every tool in the box to bring down the Good Friday Agreement and the power-sharing institutions.
Not that it’s only the need to protect the Good Friday Agreement and our fragile peace that will weigh heavily on the minds of the Parades Commission and those state bodies tasked with deciding whether or not to force a parade through in the unimaginable event that a ruling is made in favour of the Orange. The Garvaghy Road is 1.5 kilometres long.
The under-strength and under-resourced PSNI is quite simply and obviously physically incapable of clearing a path for 60 men in sashes to swagger through that Catholic neighbourhood. Which means that either the British army will have to be brought in – and we have those militarised late-90s images of the Drumcree scene seared into our consciousness – or police officers from British forces will have to be deployed.
The latter contingency is what the PSNI has opted for on those more recent occasions that they have been overwhelmed by events on the street. Most notably that was the case during the loyalist race riots of the summer just past.
But whether it’s British soldiers or police officers with English, Scots or Welsh accents who are drafted in to drive Garvaghy Catholics back into their homes at the request of the Orange Order and the cynical agitators it has sub-contracted to do its lobbying, peace cannot survive another Drumcree.
That’s why we say with some conviction that the decision which the Parades Commission will make this week will go against the Orange Order and will upset the three unionist parties who have unanimously thrown their weight behind this crazy attempt to drag us backwards.
There is no sign that the DUP, the UUP or the TUV are preparing their various constituencies for what lies ahead. And that failure to ready the ground for disappointment is going to make things harder not only for those of us who abhor the jawdropping nihilism of this Drumcree resurrection; it will make things harder for those three parties too.
The summer is over. That means the holidays and long evenings that facilitated the Drumcree madness of the late-90s will not be an assisting factor. Large, seething crowds are unlikely to turn out. And so unionism must face up to new circumstances.
In the virtually inconceivable event of a march being okayed, the new political circumstances will be too dire to contemplate.
