Three decades ago, it took the deaths of three Roman Catholic children – the Quinn brothers, Jason, nine, Mark, 10, and 11-year-old Richard – in a petrol bomb attack to bring an end to the Drumcree dispute. “No road is worth a life, let alone the lives of three little boys,” the Orange Order’s County Armagh chaplain said at the time.
It is perhaps extraordinary to think that this could ever have needed saying – but that was then. Northern Ireland is very different place today.
Passions are running high, but the attempt by 35 members of the Protestant Orange Order to walk down Garvaghy Road, a main thoroughfare in a predominantly nationalist part of Drumcree in Portadown, County Armagh, did not lead to violence on Sunday or Monday.
Faced with thousands of members of the nationalist community standing in their way and a police line ordering them back, Orange Order district master Nigel Dawson concluded: “There’s no point getting wet unnecessarily,” as he instructed members of the order back inside the church hall to shelter from the rain.
Every half-hour on Monday, the Orange Order members walked up to police lines only to be turned back by Supt Brendan Green, but the process was peaceful and respectful.
The blessed absence of the old ways does not make what is happening at Drumcree any less significant, however. History doesn’t repeat itself, and although hope and history sometimes rhyme, more often we hear echoes of history returning to us.
The divisions and tendency towards cynical political posturing in Northern Ireland, papered over by the 1998 Good Friday agreement – when all sides were exhausted by the hate and misery of the three decades of Troubles – have been all too evident of late.
This particular dispute can be reasonably argued either way. The independent Parades Commission has ruled that the march down the Garvaghy Road is permissible. The marchers are simply taking advantage of their rights, it may be said. But is it really necessary to take this road after 28 years of the march being banned? Who is served by the provocation?
The detail of the argument is perhaps less important than the fact that it is happening, and what that says about Northern Ireland today, and what it may mean for the future.
On the nationalist side, there has been growing and bristling self-confidence about the prospects of a border poll on a united Ireland. This was only inflated by Donald Trump’s recent suggestion that a unified Ireland should happen sooner rather than later. “The days of unionist supremacy and domination are gone,” said the first minister, Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin, on Monday after appearing herself in Drumcree. “We will not be going backwards.”
The numbers gathering from the nationalist community, some of whom were bussed in from Belfast and Derry, appeared to surprise the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It was a moment of unity within an often fractured nationalist community.
Those in attendance included Colin Duffy and his brother Paul, who were both acquitted of terror charges in 2015, along with the SDLP party leader Claire Hanna, a vehement critic of those who reach for violence as an answer.
Meanwhile, for the unionists, the changed relationship with the rest of the UK brought about by the Brexit deal and changing demographics has arguably engendered a distinct lack of confidence about the future.
Gavin Robinson, the leader of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP), the largest unionist party, claimed on Monday that “standards have been shattered” by the presence of the first minister with the protesters in Drumcree.
When O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Féin in the Republic of Ireland, arrived at the protest, it was to chants of “bring it down” and “fuck Stormont”, in reference to power-sharing arrangements in Northern Ireland, structured to make unionists and nationalists work together.
“How we can go forward when there is such a level of disdain for the simple fundamental democratic principles of society?” asked Robinson of the attempt by the first minister to block a lawful march.
It is likely that the prospect of elections for the Northern Ireland assembly next year, and the need to rally the faithful to their respective cause, is not helping to calm the rhetoric.
In Stormont, the speaker, Edwin Poots, a former leader of the DUP, condemned the first minister for her “gross discourtesy” and “contempt” in not coming to answer an urgent question about the crisis.
In this context, there is concern that even if Sinn Féin’s leaders, with the crowds’ chants ringing in their ears, do not walk out of the Northern Ireland executive, that the DUP could well do so.
After a prolonged period in which agreement on a budget for Northern Ireland’s collapsing public services has not been found with Westminster, such further fracturing risks a whole new level of instability.
The Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Bryant, spoke to Breandán Mac Cionnaith, from the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition, on Monday. The possibility of mediation was discussed, Mac Cionnaith said. Speaking in the Republic, Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, called for cool heads. “No one wants to go back to the past divisions, to past trauma that we experienced at Garvaghy Road, Drumcree, in the past,” he said. “I would say to Sinn Féin and to everybody else: time to dial back now and time to engage in dialogue, and to work this out in a sensible, community-based way.”
