ANYONE who believes for a second that the renewed focus on the Garvaghy Road is about religious freedom and inalienable rights needs to focus a little bit more on the dramatis personae of this bleak new production of a grim old drama.
The 1950s tribute act that is the TUV and eternal student Jamie Bryson are running this show. Those relative dullards in the Orange Order and the DUP who believe that the aim of these two actors is simply to get a march down the Garvaghy Road have not been paying attention to their long and familiar filmography. Both hold as their undisputed political priority the ditching of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and the end of the quarter-century power-sharing experiment.
A march along the Garvaghy Road would suit their purposes, but a rejection of a march by the current or a reconstituted Parades Commission would be an equally welcome outcome.
In the continued absence of consent, the only way a parade is going along the Garvaghy Road is through a kilometre-and-a-half-long tunnel of heavy armour and riot-clad PSNI officers and British soldiers. And if that old partnership is reconstituted to force a parade through – as was the case in the late-90s – the strain on the political institutions will almost certainly prove too great for them to survive.
If the Orange Order’s revised application is knocked back – as it should and almost certainly will be – the route is open for the merchants of chaos to take centre-stage once again.
Let’s not beat about the bush here – both contingencies come with a heavy chance, not to say likelihood, of street disorder. We should not be afraid to point out bluntly and unambiguously the potential for serious community unrest of the kind that led to loss of life and loss of trust the last time around. The Parades Commission – whatever its composition – is faced with a simple choice that it must not allow to be complicated by those whose stated aim is the collapse of the GFA.
1. Persist with a new status quo which has brought 28 years of peace and stability to an area once a byword for bitterness and violence.
2. Ditch that hard-won peace and give the Orange Order exactly what it wants in the knowledge that the people who live there will mobilise to protect their rights and their dignity. At which point, call the British army.
It is virtually inconceivable that a march will get the go-ahead, and not just because any Parades Commission, not just this one, can only look at the last 28 years and continue to bank the benefits. Will a new British Prime Minister and Secretary of State countenance a return to an episode which many observers identify as the closest we ever came to civil war? Can Andy Burnham deliver the governmental strategy that he has laid out against a background of spiralling unrest here?
Against that inauspicious background for unionism, the Orange Order grows more intransigent – with a strategy not even of their devising.
