On Drumcree, and all that

In Northern Ireland, there’s never a tit without a tat.

I was born and raised about six miles from the Monaghan-Armagh border, at its closest point. When I think back to my childhood, in the 1980s and early 1990s, I vividly remember the enormous British Army checkpoint at Aughnacloy, and the tension my parents felt – and tried to conceal from us – driving through it.

The soldiers there must have felt some tension too, given that the IRA tried to kill them all on at least three occasions when I was a kid – a heavy machine gun attack in 1991, a mortar attack in 1994, and another machine gun attack in the same year, when I was ten years old.

To travel from our home, near Castleblayney, to Dundalk, took us through Cullaville.

Then, as now, Cullaville was a hotbed of Republicanism. Then, as no longer, one would pass the infamous “sniper at work” signs, designed to intimidate the British Army or anybody else who didn’t want to be shot. Once – but only once – there was a checkpoint there not run by the British, but by men in balaclavas who presumably answered to the Army Council. That was probably more disquieting than the Brits, to anyone driving through.

Thankfully those days have gone and that road is now littered, not with sniper at work signs, but with enormously large homes built in the post-peace process years when business, it seems, was good.

Visit Latlurcan cemetery in Monaghan Town, where my grandparents and uncle lie at rest, and thirty yards from their graves lie the remains of Jim Lynagh, killed by the SAS at the Loughgall Ambush in 1987 as he tried to blow up a police station in that small town. His grave, like most IRA graves, is adorned with a headstone much more elaborate than what the common family can afford.

Meanwhile, on Bragan Bog, a few miles to the north where I used to spend miserable days with those same grandparents in life, cutting turf, there are other graves. Unmarked ones. For Northern Catholics the IRA didn’t like. They don’t get the big headstones. They didn’t even get a funeral.

Now, I write these things not to present myself as some traumatised veteran of the troubles™. I had a happy childhood. I’m just saying: I remember this shit. I remember what it was like. And the moral certainty that brought it all about. There are a lot of people in this country, from a lot of places much further removed from Northern Ireland, who never had to be as close to it.

Drumcree is the worst of it. Drumcree is it at its purest.

What possessed the PSNI to tell the Parades Commission that they thought that a parade down that road could be peacefully accommodated should, in my view, be the subject of scientific research. The people who made that determination should have their brains donated to science, that they might be studied.

But nevertheless, the recommendation was made. The courts and the system have told the Portadown Orange Lodge – not an institution that has always covered itself in glory – that thirty-five of them may walk down a public road to complete their restricted 1998 parade.

The law, the system, and the independent methods of arbitration that have kept the peace (mostly) for thirty years have, finally, just once, come down on the Orange side in that particular existential fight.

The loyalists had been losing that one for so long that they’d forgotten what it felt to win one, I think. Meanwhile the nationalists had been winning the fight for so long that they, in turn, had forgotten it even was one.

What I’ll say is this: All of this matters a great deal.

You cannot expect people to live in a country that remains tribally divided, and then tell them that the laws designed to keep the peace between them only apply to one side.

For thirty years, Nationalists have told the Portadown Orangemen that they must abide by the law and the decisions of the courts and commissions and the rest of it. For thirty years, albeit without much good grace, the Orangemen have complied.

Now, Nationalists are saying that they will not do the same. And for now, they are getting their way. What’s more, I think they will probably triumph, ultimately.

They will triumph because they operate from a position of strategic strength on the escalation ladder. For the parade to go down the road, the police would have to escalate and remove them, and therefore be seen to be the ones starting the violence. No UK politician – especially a Welsh Labour Party man of the left, like Chris Bryant – will ever order that.

But nationalism’s local position of strategic strength is not replicated elsewhere across the province. And setting a precedent whereby people power and politicians combining to give the law two fingers is an example that others will, surely, follow. There will be no tit without, somewhere else, a tat. There never is, in Northern Ireland.

That’s what gave us the bloodshed, remember? Some self-appointed person in the IRA would decide to give the order to shoot a policeman. Some drugged up maniac in the UVF would kill a catholic or two in response, which got a response, which got a response. That cycle kept the entire nonsense going for decades, long after anyone with a brain could see that the “armed struggle” was going nowhere.

This is the kind of cycle that made household names out of animals like Michael Stone and Dessie O’Hare, who in other lives would have merely terrorised their wives and children and left the rest of us alone.

So spare me the crying about the Garvaghy Road. The residents there have gotten their way for three decades – their way, remember, being that they have a veto over who walks on a public, taxpayer road.

The sight of Brendan McCionnath back in the news – someone Tony Blair once described as the most unreasonable man he had ever met – and Mary Lou McDonald nodding along as her supporters call people “bastards”… that’s not what anybody needed.

Peace would have been better served by letting the thirty-five lads walk down the road, and then stopping them by means of the law next year, and the year after. If you can’t tolerate people walking on a road, then what can you tolerate?

Nothing but total victory, is the answer it seems for many. But here’s a last question: If nationalism cannot respect the law on a parade, and seeks to overturn it with force – why, oh why, in gods name, should any unionist ever respect the law on a democratic vote for unity?

JMG