Who would ever think of putting the legal adviser to Hamas and the fascistic ultra-Zionist Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir into a room together to negotiate a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? But something similarly unreal is happening in talks to try to find an end to the nightmarish deadlock at Drumcree. On the one side is the Portadown district of the Orange Order, often led – judging by television pictures and press statements – by its young legal adviser, the ultra-loyalist agitator Jamie Bryson. On the other are the Garvaghy Road nationalist residents, led by Breandán Mac Cionnaith, a former Provisional IRA bomber and now a member of Eirígi, an anti-Good Friday Agreement dissident republican group. Indeed, one thing these two men have in common – apart from their unelected status – is their commitment to wrecking that historic 1998 agreement which, for all its faults, has led to nearly 30 years of a large degree of peace in Northern Ireland.
According to the Belfast Telegraph‘s Sam McBride: “Sinn Féin rarely faces a rival like this, and is visibly in his wake. He sounds like a throwback to the 1990s.” He quoted Mac Cionnaith as openly referring to the Orangemen as “those fuckers,” repeatedly referring to “the Brits” and predicting that the parade would be forced through and “there will be a battle”.1
In his memoir, Tony Blair remembered that “the Drumcree people were the unreasonable of the unreasonable of the unreasonable” (he didn’t specify which side, or both). “In the Premier League of unreasonableness, they left every other faction and every other dispute gasping in their wake,” he wrote.
And then he lighted on “this one guy, Breandán Mac Cionnaith”. He painted a picture: “He took unreasonableness to an art form. He conceded nothing, and I mean nothing. I’m not just talking about the substance of meetings, I mean where a meeting should be held. Who should be there. Who shouldn’t be there. When it began. When it ended. What its purpose was. Who spoke first. Who spoke last. Who spoke in between first and last.”2
Bryson told supporters last Wednesday (three days after the scheduled march was blocked by residents from going down the Garvaghy Road): “The Portadown district are not doing any deal – there is no document on the table. And Portadown district would not be doing any deal which doesn’t deliver on the fundamental legal principle and the fundamental legal principle is this – that the Portadown district will walk the Garvaghy Road.”
Last year, Mac Cionnaith did an interview with an Éirígí podcast, in which he likened the Orange Order to the Ku Klux Klan, saying he’d told this to ethnic minorities in England who saw the Drumcree situation as “a very overt form of racism, similar to what they were dealing with”. Rather than seeing unionism as a wholly legitimate political ideology, he suggested there was a media conspiracy to avoid scrutinising it: “They’ll all back away from the hard questions; you know, what is unionism? What does it represent? What did it represent? It represented a one-party state in the six counties, similar to the one you had in South Africa.” How this kind of extremely hard-line language and demonisation of unionists is going to help nationalists and unionists to come together in a mutually respectful united Ireland one day soon is highly questionable.
The resurrection of the dreadful corpse that was the Drumcree parade, banned for 28 years by the Parades Commission, was the result of sloppy procedures and a technical error by that body, and a series of last minute court hearings in Belfast which failed to find against its resulting legality. One is tempted to say this was an example of the law being “an ass.” One judge, later over-ruled in another midnight high court hearing, had urged the parties in the parade dispute to “step back from the abyss” and reach a compromise for the sake of everyone in Northern Ireland. Six hours after that middle-of-the-night hearing, the legally-permitted march was blocked by residents in Garvaghy Road.
The crying need for compromise was also the message from the Alliance leader and justice minister, Naomi Long. Speaking on RTE, she said the people of the North were experiencing “incredulity and a degree of despair” that this long-forgotten trauma had re-emerged. She said the Orange Order had now established in law that that they had the right to walk the Garvaghy Road. “They do not have to exercise that right”, she went on. “They can do the right thing by the community on the Garvaghy Road”, as well as the entire people of Northern Ireland, by not marching along that nationalist road. She pointed out that there was another undisputed route of exactly the same length which they could march home on from Drumcree church to Portadown Orange Hall.
“I appeal for people to be wise,” she continued. “Courts can’t rule for reconciliation. That requires people to show wisdom and courage and grace and generosity. And that’s what’s required at this point in time.” However she regretted that those who “have unpicked this wound and have gone about trying to drag us back to the past are not minded to make the compromise that is required.” Wisdom and courage and grace and generosity in Portadown? Pigs would fly to Pluto first.
[I only wish that that Northern voters could become mature and non-tribal enough to add enough of their votes to the already growing Alliance total, so that one day soon a wise and smart and even-handed woman like Naomi Long might become First Minister.]
Not much wisdom was shown by opposition politicians in the Republic either as senior members of Aontú, People Before Profit and the Social Democrats lined up with the northern nationalist tribe and queued for photo opportunities on the Garvaghy Road. There is no difficult situation in Northern Ireland that can’t be made worse by the noisy arrival of Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald and her entourage. ” If the march was permitted, “by God, there will be a reckoning”, she declared.
The Irish Times political editor, Pat Leahy, concluded that the message of their presence to middle of the road ‘persuadables’ in the North – many of them moderate unionists – is that “in a united Ireland, many southern politicians are full square behind northern nationalists. That can only make them wary of the promises that unionists will be entitled to full respect and protection in the ‘new Ireland’.”3
One of the gravest fears now is contagion; that what started in Portadown will envelop other parades, with old disputes resurrected by the Orange Order and new objections raised by nationalists. Sam McBride interviewed Noel Liggett, district master of the Ballynafeigh Orange lodge in Belfast’s Ormeau Road, another former flashpoint which has been peaceful for many years (constituency MP and SDLP leader Clare Hanna, who was at the Garvaghy Road protest, nominated Liggett for an MBE), says he still hopes the order can walk the length of that road again. He wants Southern voters to know that “they are nowhere near ready for taking on Northern Ireland – they haven’t even begun to think of the type of compromise that would have to be made…or the tensions and difficulties they would be taking on.”4
In a column last week McBride put the Drumcree imbroglio in the context of the near total breakdown of government at Stormont. Unionist and nationalist politicians there are “united in despondency” he wrote.5 And the unapologetic appearance of First Minister Michelle O’Neill (who took office promising she would be a ‘First Minister for all’) at an illegal protest on the Garvaghy Road did not help at all.
McBride wrote that power-sharing is “now characterised by not quite hatred, but is approaching that depth of intense dislike.” Sinn Fein and the DUP “might still believe in power-sharing — most, in fact, still accept that it is the only basis on which Northern Ireland can be governed — but I do not believe a single MLA genuinely thinks this Assembly or Executive is capable of doing what they have promised the public they will do. When devolution was restored two and a half years ago, Michelle O’Neill and DUP Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly both told their voters not to simply judge them on survival, but on delivery. Now it seems they might not even manage to clear the first of those bars. There’s not even a one per cent chance they’ll clear the second.”
He gave the example of last Tuesday’s Assembly sitting, which, even allowing for a considerable period for arguing about Drumcree, was suspended after 47 minutes because they couldn’t think of much else to do. He pointed out that that morning Sinn Fein’s Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins had tabled a piece of legislation to extend the period when there will be no domestic water charges — even for the wealthiest homeowners — for another five years. “That means that until at least 2032, the health, education, roads, housing and other budgets will have to be raided for NI Water. And even with that, there’s nowhere near enough money, meaning that raw sewage is being poured into Lough Neagh — and then the drinking water for 40% of Northern Ireland is being drawn from that same heavily polluted waterbody.
“This is a vast scandal for which Stormont is primarily to blame. It has implications most obviously for the environment, but also for agriculture, for house-building, for tourism, for the economy and for nearly every area of life. The Speaker told MLAs that there was no time limit on the debate. They could have spent days discussing this crucial policy. But, no, after Kimmins spoke, just two of the 90 MLAs made short perfunctory speeches before the policy was nodded through.”
The Republic has a different dilemma. Pat Leahy asked whether the South was ready to take on the near-insoluble problems of northern sectarianism like Drumcree. “Given the general disinterest in the North among many people in the South…a lot of people in the South might quietly conclude: this is not our problem. They’ll ask themselves: why should we import that sectarian mindset down here? Why would we want that security nightmare? That additional cost?
“Many people in the Republic will believe that the costs of a united Ireland – financial or otherwise – are worth it. But those who want to consider the price the South would have to pay – in social, political, constitutional, security, identity and financial terms – before they make up their mind, will have been given much to think about over the past week.
“The great unity nightmare has always been that in parallel referendums, the North says ‘yes’ and the South says ‘eh, no thanks.’ I fear that outcome has been made more likely by the events in Drumcree.”
1 ‘Marching backwards: Drumcree stand-off hardens even moderate hearts as fear of contagion mounts’, Belfast Telegraph, 4 October
2 Gerry Moriarty, ‘Breandán Mac Cionnaith profile: ‘The ex-IRA man who Tony Blair said ‘took unreasonableness to an art form’, Irish Times, 29 September
3 ‘Is the South ready to take on problems like Drumcree?’ Irish Times, 3 October
4 ‘Marching backwards: Drumcree stand-off hardens even moderate hearts as fear of contagion mounts.’
5 ‘There are no true believers in Stormont any more. It is a place of despondency where MLAs knock off early’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 October
