THE performative nonsense we’ve seen from unionist parties in the past week on the issue of commemoration is entirely to be expected. But the decision of the Alliance Party to add its voice to the babel came as more of a surprise.

That the UUP, the party which more than any other actor brought about the violence that erupted in the late 60s through its half-century of ruthless and bigoted one-party rule, would lecture others on the pain caused by the past would be hilarious if it were not so tragic. As for the DUP, here’s a party that was in on the launch of a paramilitary army – Ulster Resistance – which went on to import a massive shipment of weapons used by various loyalist paramilitary groups to slaughter Catholics. To be lectured on respectful remembrance by a party whose leader wore a red beret at the launch of a deadly loyalist militia is so outrageous as to border on the surreal.

But for the Alliance Party to suggest that individuals, groups and communities do not have the right to remember their dead because they don’t fit into a unionist narrative of the Troubles was desperately disappointing.

Let’s be absolutely clear about this: Republicans will never stop commemorating their dead, nor should they, and the thundering hypocrisy of the UUP and DUP in insisting that they do will only confirm them in their determination not to be dictated to a quarter of a century after the IRA departed the stage. Those unionist parties keep making this pointless demand because it keeps their base in a state of perpetual fury, but why Alliance have decided to lay down moral guidelines for the bereaved is not at all clear. It may well be that it’s part of the party’s understandable desire to appeal to unionist voters in places where they have an excellent chance of making future gains – and since the South Armagh story gained such incredible media traction the need to take sides in a debate in which there can never be any winners may have been irresistible.

But the party should know that people aren’t stupid. Its claim to have been a neutral observer in a conflict in which it didn’t take sides is bogus. They supported – and support – the British Army, the UDR and the RUC, and they commemorate them too, despite those groups carrying out some of the most heinous atrocities of the conflict  and colluding with loyalist murder gangs. That’s Alliance’s choice and they are entitled to make it, but when at the same time they demand that others stop commemorating in their own way, they buy into the debilitating unionist contention that there is only one truth about the past, one narrative that must be accepted by all.

There isn’t. There never will be. Accepting that republicans believe their dead to have been honourable men and women who fought for what they believed in is not to endorse that belief, it is simply to acknowledge a fact.  Denying it means the past will remain a battlefield where the din of clashing ideologies deafens us to the quiet voice of reality.