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This is not just about Orange Order entitlement to walk a stretch of road – it is about entitlement to rule the roost
Three little boys were sleeping in their beds just after four o’clock in the morning when a car slowed down in front of their home and the petrol bomb thrown from it burned them to death.
It was July Twelfth, the apex of triumphalism in the loyalist calendar and, in Drumcree, the Orange Order was demanding a “right to walk the queen’s highway” in triumphalist parade on the Garvaghy Road. When photographs of the Quinn boys were published, the world abruptly stopped spinning. Richard , Mark and Jason glowed with guiltlessness. The UVF killed them simply because they were Catholics, regardless that their school and their mother’s partner were Protestant.
Four years of Drumcree protests had already sparked numerous sectarian killings. A taxi driver shot dead in his car. A 12-year-old boy killed while running from a chasing pack. The PSNI ’s predecessor, the RUC, recorded 144 houses damaged, 178 vehicles hijacked, 284 arrests, 76 police officers injured, 632 petrol bombs and 837 plastic rounds fired by the RUC in a period of four years from 1995 to 1998 inclusive.
But it was the image of the Quinn children that captured the lethal lunacy of Orangemen insisting on showboating an ancient battle victory over ancestors of Portadown’s minority, the nationalists living on the Garvaghy Road. Even after the three white coffins went into the ground, the Orange Order persisted with its attempts to parade on the road, but their numbers dwindled and a facade of peace descended when the Parades Commission refused them permission year after year. Until now.
Had he been let live, Mark Quinn would be the same age now as Christopher Nelson, who has been speaking about his horror at Drumcree’s convulsions since Sunday. He was 11 when his mother, Rosemary Nelson, the solicitor for the Garvaghy Road residents, arrived outside her daughter’s primary school one lunchtime and a bomb hidden under her car exploded.
It had been planted by the Red Hand Defenders, a dissident group comprised of members of the LVF and the Orange Volunteers. The human rights lawyer died on the operating table. A mother of three school-age children with a client book featuring Protestants as well as Catholics, she had previously been assaulted by RUC officers. On RTÉ ’s Liveline, Christopher said he had not told his own child where her mother disappeared to since Sunday.
He pretends she came home while the child was sleeping and left before she woke. The truth is she has been protesting with her community against the diabolical decision to allow Orangemen on to the Garvaghy Road for their Battle of the Boyne church commemoration. When experts talk about the intergenerational trauma bequeathed by the Troubles, the Nelson family is a textbook case. There is near consensus that the reopening of Drumcree’s tinderbox proves Ireland is not ready for reunification.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin prescribes reconciliation between the North’s divided communities – a noble proposition, but a wishful one. Reconciliation only works when all sides accept equal status. The Orange claim to superior consideration in Drumcree, despite all the grief and horror it has caused, is a rejection of the Belfast Agreement’s requirement for a parity of esteem. This is not just about entitlement to walk a stretch of road.
It is about entitlement to rule the roost. It is no coincidence that this came a fortnight after the US president fan boy ed Irish reunification and ahead of next year’s Assembly elections. The mistake made by “not yet” rejectionists of unification is that they cling to the hope people steeped in the history of their own presumed superiority can be won round to equality by rational persuasion.
Loyalist chauvinism did not start last Sunday or in Drumcree in 1995 or with the Troubles in 1969 or in 1920 with partition and the establishment of a sectarian Northern state. It is centuries old. The first Orange parade in Drumcree took place in July 1795, instigated by a Protestant minister whose sermon “so worked up the minds of his audience gave full scope to their anti-papistical zeal” on their way home from church. Thus recorded historian Francis Plowden.
In History of Ireland, published in 1809, he described the ensuing mob “falling upon every Catholic they met, beating and bruising them without provocation or distinction, breaking the doors and windows of their houses, and actually murdering two unoffending Catholics in a bog”. Behind the salubrious tourism images, Northern Ireland is a precarious state with dysfunctional political institutions, segregated education, nationalists fleeing over the Border every marching season and a so-called peace wall still separating the sides.
Government ministers say this week’s Garvaghy Road impasse is a rogue episode and that most parades are peaceful. Have they forgotten the 2019 Apprentice Boys parade when the flute band flaunted the insignia of the British Army’s parachute regiment on their uniforms in Derry, where the paras killed 13 Catholics on Bloody Sunday?
What the latest Drumcree standoff proves is not that a united Ireland must be put back on the shelf, but that the reunification of this island is the North’s best bet. Birthright privilege is the essence of a monarchy, such as the UK. A republic such as Ireland, on the other hand, pledges itself to the ethos that all citizens are equal.
Of course, governments have failed to always honour that principle but the very requirement for it sows its value in the psychology of a country. That is not so in Northern Ireland. Long after life was viciously extinguished for the Quinn brothers, loyalism still demands its birthright privilege.
The ghost of Drumcree has come back to haunt and taunt Garvaghy Road residents in the days when Germany is celebrating Unity Day, marking its reunification in 1990 after 45 years of being divided in two.
“Did Germany make any mistake with reunification that Ireland could learn from? ” I asked a very clever German official who has been deeply involved in the project since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He considered the question for a while before answering.
“You can wait too long,” he said. Sometimes, we humans get too bogged down in the past to be able to recognise a better future.
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