Of course the Parades Commission is operating in a context that is highly politicised; though it is meant to be outside ‘political considerations, that idea was dashed when a parade on the Ormeau Road was denied in deference to the ‘Peace Process’ – which looked like not placing responsibility on republicans not to riot. The ‘political process’ has been elevated to over-write all other considerations and the consequent political interference or indifference with respect to parades has been to the detriment of the Rule of Law. No better example of that is the absolute breakdown in authority evident in violence across Northern Ireland in the week of the 12^th July 2010.  Politics and police just stood there taking the abuse and with little evidence of a longer-term response.

While parading by the Orange Order may have provided a context at the 12th, there was little evidence that the July rioters cared deeply whether the Orange Order paraded or not.  The principal battle for hearts and minds is being played out in the Republican/nationalist communities – violence in Lurgan and Londonderry, and elsewhere, was pure thuggery to demonstrate that Sinn Fein’s support for the devolution of policing means little on the streets. The new Republicans on the block have learned well from those who similarly brought anger to the streets in the past: a progression from one generation to the next.

Meanwhile a review of legislation on parades and protest is on-going. The OFMDFM consultation is now the seventh review of the Parades Commission since its inception.

From the outset the Parades Commission was an unparalleled and unwarranted interference with the peaceful expression of a people’s culture and had significant potential to undermine of the Rule of Law. There is no moral or human rights justification for political and legal interference with cultural expression: quite the contrary.  Trade Unionists claim the limitation within the OFMDFM paper are unique in Europe forget that they failed to raise a voice on the Parades Legislation which was similarly unique and intolerant.

Since the inception of the Parades Commission there has been a clear admission by Republicanism of a planned process to use the issue of parades for political advantage.

Sinn Fein has made no secret of its political activity in raising the parades issue.  In the event the political process has been used as a sledgehammer to demonise, diminish and disrupt the exercise of legal, peaceful and fundamental freedom of cultural expression.  The policy has been one of creating a cultural apartheid where no Protestant is seen, heard, or permitted within a stones throw of a designated, reserved, “sanitised” nationalist space:

There were a number of distinct advantages for Republicans in moving forward on the parades agenda. First it plays to the gallery and maintains a wedge between communities. In the absence of armed conflict it maintains a war of words that retains simmering sectarian tensions on which republicanism relies for purpose. This was a political hammer being used to crack a cultural nut. While leaders of the Orange Order may from time to time make pronouncements on broad political matters, it does not function as a political organisation. It was always poorly suited to a public political argument and certainly not to understand or challenge a political machine.

Political interference has prolonged the parades issue in Northern Ireland.  The Parades Commission was itself a buck-passing exercise by the NIO, supported by the police – a firewall to take the heat off the Secretary of State and Chief Constable.  It was born of political strategy and suckled by the political expediency of politicians who wanted to be seen as leading the fight (both sides), and by the demands of the ‘political process’ that meant not confronting the realities of rights and responsibilities as they should be within a society where the Rule of Law is paramount.

How the placing of the Parades issue into the Office of OFMDFM will not result in political interference/dealing/brokering is outside thedissenter’s ability to imagine.  The present proposals seem to have been predicated on a political deal at Hillsborough.  That the issue of Parades is being discussed in the context of a political deal is itself a weakness and indicative of a fundamental flaw in strategic thinking.  A principled and fair outcome to the resolution of parades issues should be a local matter, having due respect for the Rule of Law, and not reliant on externalities.  If the Review itself depends on a political deal, then how will parades not continue to be politicised and used to modulate tensions and division to the benefit of a few and to the detriment of all?

The process outlined by this most recent consultation process merely transfers the Parades Commission from being a quasi-judicial ‘independent’ body within the orbit of the NIO, to a quasi-judicial office within the orbit of the OFMDFM.  This does not inspire confidence in transparency, accountability or an end to political interference.    A previous ‘Quigley Report’ on parades had positive ideas with respect to an open, accountable and transparent process of addressing parading issues.  There were elements of the mediation aspects of that Report which were woolly, but if offered a strategic view rather than political fix.

The current proposals do not offer significant encouragement to believe that a Shared Future is possible while a process exists in law that can be used to politically delineate and define ‘our streets’, and ‘our territory’. That this process is given legal standing does not remove legislation on parades and protest from the status of base sectarian harassment of folks wishing to be free to express their culture or viewpoints in peace and without fear of threat or violence.

In a normal society, one in which cultural pluralism is the norm and freedom of conscience is cherished, where another’s culture and views are respected, there would be no need for parades regulation by whatever name that body is known.  The Ashdown Interim Consultation Report assumed the premise of a ‘normal’ society.  If OFMDFM believed that Northern Ireland society has the ability to move forward then why consider the regulation of a people’s culture to be at all necessary?  How does legislation that tends towards cultural apartheid and unreasonably and unfairly penalises a particular culture.

The Rule of Law should be sufficient to protect freedoms without regulatory bodies open to political interference. But authority, and the leadership that falls from that place of respect and standing in either politics or policing, seems absent. That we are where we are on parades and protests shows an attitude that all too readily accepts intolerance and exclusion as a norm, and for some is a political necessity.

All the ingredients were there: the crisis, the Prime Ministers, the big house, the Belfast Telegraph survey, the Parties doing all night sittings and the press pack.  At the end of all that we have the “Agreement at Hillsborough Castle” as it is officially described.  Not a deal.  Not “The Hillsborough Castle Agreement”.  Nothing definitive, just ‘agreement’ as part of a step process: same process as the “Agreement at St Andrews‘.

Many are of course delighted that there was any sort of agreement at all.  Especially Gordon Brown who would undoubtedly not wish one of New Labour’s great projects to crash just before a Westminster election, and probably David Cameron who will not inherit an immediate crisis should he become Prime Minister after the General Election.  

 The ‘Agreement at Hillsborough’ amounts to very little but a process that revolves around progress towards the devolution of Policing & Justice.  The only certainty is that there is a date assigned for the transfer of Policing and Justice to the Northern Ireland Assembly. That date appears to be conditional on a range of other points/matters/actions happening in some sort of sequence.

What are the chances of the agreement working out to a conclusion?  The Agreement is in five parts.

Section One provides a date for the devolution of Policing and Justice to the Northern Ireland Assembly.  There are a series of procedural steps which, so long as Gordon Brown does not call an election in the next few weeks should see the formal transfer of powers by 12 April. 

Section Two is Parades. It is hard to see how Sinn Fein will ever accept that people lawfully and peacefully should not be subject to the sectarian harassment of unlawful violent protest, or a planned protest which lacks the discipline to behave in a civilised manner. The pursuit of cultural apartheid through designation of Protestant-free zones seems to underline republican demonisation of the Loyal Orders. Hard to see how Republicans will ever agree to a shared future when they are unable to countenance sharing a stretch of road a few times a year; not that many in the SDLP are more tolerant.

Section Three is a clever device to sideline the UUP and SDLP.  The problems with the functionality of the Executive lie in the institutional arrangements; the Executive seeks to enforce consensus among a disparate group of political parties which, leaving aside their constitutional pre-dispositions, have little in common. Section Three is not likely to amount to much more than the generation of a whinge list, but is disconnected to the issue of the devolution of Policing and Justice, and therefore is of little immediate consequence.

Section Four outlines no more than just an administrative catch-up process.  As with Section Three this is not timetabled and therefore may well be forgotten about unless there is a need to show something of progress – even if it is only seeing the Executive finally get round to doing what it ought to have already done, which if they were able to agree they would have done already.

Section Five is timetabled, and suggests that the Junior Ministers will be exceptionally busy. Not only are they putting a progress and action plan together for outstanding Executive business (Section Four), they will also be doing a report on outstanding issues from the St Andrews Agreement.  The most recent Policing and Justice ‘crisis’ has arisen from a very different determination what is meant by in paragraph 7 of the Agreement at St Andrews : “It is our view that implementation of the agreement published today should be sufficient to build the community confidence necessary for the Assembly to request the devolution of criminal justice and policing from the British Government by May 2008.” If there is failure to even agree on what was agreed then, what presently constitutes an ‘outstanding matter’ may well be a challenge in itself.

The fanfare for this ‘agreement’ is worthy of a snake oil salesmen’s convention. Agreed, tentatively and with provisos, is a date for the devolution of Policing and Justice.  That is it. The DUP has allowed the issue of ‘community confidence’ to focus on the parades issue, but that is just one area where confidence in the Stormont administration is weak.  Lack of accountability, the chimera of collective responsibility and absent democratic counterbalance of effective opposition are fundamentals that appear not to have been discussed at Hillsborough, yet are underlying factors in the lack of unionist confidence in Stormont generally.

Sectioning parades hides the real fear of devolution of Policing and Justice with respect to that issue: Section One (9), that a future Minister could take a decision by request or otherwise, to step in to ban a parade without recourse to the Executive. Given the history of the generation of parades contention by Sinn Fein, the pattern is set.  With the Justice Minister open to d’Hondt in the next Assembly the ground is set for a heightening of conflict centred on parades, whoever gets the Justice Ministry. 

The quasi-judicial powers of the Justice Minister is the ticking time-bomb on parades. More immediately, the parades fuse is lit on this ‘Agreement’. Ashdown wasn’t even close to a credible alternative to the Parades Commission. Serious questions on the process within that ‘interim’ report remain unanswered; yet that ‘report’ is noted as a start point on which to build.  

The Hillsborough talks have demonstrated that the DUP is as useless as the UUP at negotiation: the lead-up to Hillsborough was promising, but the end result is a big disappointment.  The DUP blinked, and Sinn Fein is now piling on the pressure on parades, upping the ante and making resolution on parades nigh on impossible: the most recent outburst from Martin McGuinness is an example.  More generally, the remarks by Pat Doherty point to a longer term process of attrition; building on the undermining of cultural identity and political confidence within the broad unionist electorate.   

Sinn Fein has its date for devolution of Policing and Justice.  Once in process, how many believe there will be much concluded of Sections Two, Three, Four and Five without another ‘crisis’.

By any measure, unionist community confidence in the ‘Agreement at Hillsborough’ is at best low.  The text of the published document was printed in newspapers and is readily available online as a document and subject of comment. The success of the snake oil salesman is in the ignorance and credulity of the buying public.  To presume that somehow the lack of confidence can be solved by wider publication is erroneous. 

Parades may be an obvious point of contention in this ‘Agreement’, but fundamentally the real issue is a lack of confidence in the institutions themselves into which Policing and Justice is to be devolved.  Broadly speaking, the unionist community has little desire for more snake oil from the huckster’s store, no matter how many times the bottle is rebranded ‘new & improved’.

The summer interview with Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty by the Economist (below) will not have been welcome in Republican Nationalist circles.

Around 12 minutes in, Ms Chakrabarti says: “I would say to people of faith, and to people who are not of faith, that the one right that none of us should ever have is the right not to be offended”.   

The debate on a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights is in a trough. Unsurprisingly.  Listening to many supporters of a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights brings back memories of the old Eastern Bloc Communists listing rights at conferences to show superiority over western capitalist systems. Of course it was a fantasy that the written and legal rights of the Soviet bloc could ever create wealth or well being. The hell was where such ‘rights’ could also be used to enforce exclusion and a narrow sectarian view of the world where those who questioned such rights were marginalised, at worst to the gulag.

Rights proffered by Republicans and Nationalists (and assorted leftists) are not for the benefit of the people, but as a route to power over others. Thus in the recent Sinn Fein publication on a Shared Future there is apparently objective consideration of rights and responsibilities, eg. “the right to live free from sectarian, racist or any other forms of harassment”, and “Peaceful, inclusive and unthreatening expression of culture and cultures.” At the same time there can be no doubt about the subjective interpretation (which we have heard all too often from Republicans and Nationalists) that systematically demonises Loyal Order processions as triumphal and sectarian, and has a clear outcome of the ability (or right) to exclude or dictate to the Orders on their processional routes. 

The Sinn Fein document is considerably shorter than the OFMDFM working draft (you may need to save the pdf as the link from the DUP page is temperamental).  But then Sinn Fein’s agenda is considerably narrower. Perhaps presuming that the route to adoption of its ‘rights’ agenda is unlikely to be through a Northern Irelands Bill of Rights, Sinn Fein has hit on the idea of creating a process whereby there is official sanction of its narrow sectarian parades agenda: creating areas where Sinn Fein is in a place where it is able to decide whether or not a Loyal Order Parade can walk.  A document on a Shared Future seems an inappropriate place to impose the policy for that process.

It is interesting that dialogue on the accommodation of Parades, first around the Ormeau Road, and more recently around Ardoyne, has never succeeded in identifying the cause or nature of the offence taken by Republicans or Nationalists. Those across the table from the Apprentice Boys of Derry and the North & West Belfast Parades Forum have never isolated the specifics of how a five minute walk by some shops can be of such offence that people feel the urge to violently react; hurling missiles at the participants and police.

Republicans have desperately locked themselves into an parades agenda that first demonised, and then demonised some more, and continues to demonise members of another community that, however different and British, express their culture peaceably and in good order. It would be encouraging to think that Republicans and Nationalists might seek a way out of the parades issue that was a win:win for all. Such opportunities in the past, on Ormeau and in North Belfast, have been passed by.  A win is sought at any cost, regardless of the wider consequences for society.

Instead of taking offence, or sensing grievance, Republicans and Nationalists need to work towards building a shared future. That task, for the foreseeable future, is one that means working for all the people of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom as agreed within the Good Friday Agreement.  Republicans and Nationalists can talk to themselves as long as they like about a United Ireland, but unless they can share a street every now and then there will be little respect for their larger ambitions from within the broad unionist community. Republicans cannot complain of lack of respect in Government when they show such disrespect to the ordinary Protestant on the street. Alternatively, meaningful engagement and commitment to working for a shared future will benefit everyone and earn Republicans the respect they crave.

Jonathan Sacks, as Chief Rabbi, summed up the prize for a society that lives with its differences, which has echoes of Shami’s words:  “In a plural society – all the more in a plural world – each of us has to settle for less than we do when we associate with fellow believers…. Yet what we lose is more than compensated for by the fact that together we are co-architects of a society larger than we can construct on our own, one in which our voice is heard and attended to even if it does not carry the day. Just as community is built on the willingness to let the ‘I’ be shaped by the ‘We’, so society is made by the readiness to let the ‘We’ of our community be constrained by the need to make space for the other communities and their deeply held beliefs.” from The Dignity of Difference, a plea by Jonathan Sacks for tolerance in the age of extremism.

A closer look at this incident makes the controversy over the ‘homecoming’ parade for soldiers through the streets of Belfast on Sunday 2 November, and the Sinn Fein protest march/meeting more understandable. How?

The police were alerted to the elephant’s walking in Bangor by an anti-circus campaigner. This individual gleefully told radio listeners that he took this action to highlight opposition to the use of animals in circuses. Had he chosen to make a ‘ban circuses’ placard and walked with the elephants he may have looked a little silly and a lone voice. Why look silly when you can call the police and use the law?

We can be reasonably sure that the Parades Commission, set up to consider parades in Northern Ireland, was not set up to stop an elephant walking down the road. But it can. Just as it can stop vintage car rallies and cycling clubs on the public road – yes it can!

The difficulty for the authorities in establishing the Parades Commission was that to make exceptions would have also made it obvious that the legislation was aimed primarily at the curtailment of freedom of expression by one section of the community. By far the greatest numbers of Parades are annual commemorations by the Loyal Orders.

Protest events along the Loyal Order parade routes are not unusual. If people want to protest they have that right, within the law. Nor should we be surprised if Sinn Fein have decided to bring republicans onto the streets of Belfast to protest against the ‘homecoming’ parade.

The first difficulty for Sinn Fein is that this parade is for the Royal Irish Regiment, which retains strong local attachment and many have served gallantly. Local press have reported extensively on the RIR contribution, almost exclusively on a ‘human interest’ level.

The second difficulty is the purpose served by the protest. Mostly, Sinn Fein has been at sixes and sevens on this point. Protest, as with parade, must be notified to the Parades Commission. But in the media the protest has been variously stated to be about the War in Iraq, the killing of republicans by the British Army through the years of local conflict, the British presence in Irish, and so on.

Here is the point. The lack of consistency in reasons for the protest is down to a failure to dress up naked anti-British sentiment; blatant coat-trailing. In the final analysis the opposition to the parade is opposition to anything British. Just as the issue was not the elephant down the road, but the reason the elephant was in Bangor, so it is not the ‘homecoming’ parade for the RIR, but the fact that it is the British in Northern Ireland.

So too with Loyal Order Parades. Republican opposition was orchestrated, often with extreme violence, creating the controversy that led to a clamour for the regulation of parades enabling further diminishment of fundamental freedoms – now by the state, willingly and disgracefully undermining the Rule of Law. The elephant in the room is the sheer sectarian hatred of anything and everything British.

For those few from the Protestant community taking part in face to face dialogue the frustration in never being told what the issues were with specific respect to the parade under discussion is one reason why dialogue has been so elusive. There is little evidence from the dialogue that has taken place that there is any willingness to accommodate anything that celebrates, or represents, ‘Britishness’.

The IRA’s use of meetings between communities to collect information on Protestant community leaders, to ‘target’ them in military parlance, is clear evidence of the disingenuous manner in which republicans have worked on the parades issue.

Which then brings us back to the Strategic Review on Parades, currently considering its Interim Consultation Report. The Review group should note the not unsurprisingly bitter political row that has erupted over the ‘homecoming’ parade. That a parade has once again become a political punchbag is to be expected.

Political interference has prolonged the parades issue in Northern Ireland. The Parades Commission was itself a buck-passing exercise by the NIO, supported by the police – a firewall to take the heat off the Secretary of State and Chief Constable. It was born of political strategy and suckled by the political expediency of politicians who wanted to be seen as leading the fight (both sides), and by the demands of the ‘political process’ that meant not confronting the realities of rights and responsibilities as they should be within a society where the Rule of Law is paramount.

The current ‘thinking’ of the Parades Review group is that ‘parading’ should no longer be the responsibility of a Parades Commission, but that parading is placed within the Office of OFMDFM. How this will not result in political interference/dealing/brokering is something beyond imagination.

The Strategic Review seems to be predicated on a political deal on policing and justice taking place. That the Review on Parades depends on a political deal is itself a weakness and indicative of a fundamental flaw in strategic thinking. A principled and fair outcome to the resolution of parades issues should be a local matter and not reliant on externalities. If the Review itself depends on a political deal, then how is there hope that parades will not continue to be politicised and used to modulate tensions and division to the benefit of a few and to the detriment of all.

In a free society, the Rule of Law would regulate parade and protest. The OFMDFM should be capable of respecting the necessary conditions for a free society, without rancour.

The issue of parades in Northern Ireland is unlikely to be resolved while the elephant remains in the room.

Surely a strategic report on Parades would start with the North Report, prelude to the Parades Commission being established, and review the journey since then. What has changed? It might also look at each of the five reviews of the Parades Commission that have gone before. Perhaps it might also spend some time reviewing the relative success of the Parades Commissions as lead by each of its three Chairmen.

In the absence of such review and analysis it is hard to understand how the Review team has arrived at the 8 Step process it is suggesting as a replacement for the Parades Commission. An Interim Consultation Report would surely be one where principle is outlined as a basis of moving forward, with perhaps a range of options based on those principles. Certainly it would address fundamental concerns about the Parades Commission’s present process.

A major issue around the Parades Commission has been confidentiality. The Parades Commission largely rode out the storm over information sourced from the Parades Commission being found in the possession of the IRA during the 2005 Stormontgate investigations – there has never been any explanation of how this may have occurred. At the same time the Commission has justified taking ‘evidence’ from anonymous individuals in camera on the basis of respect for confidentiality.

The Commission’s particular view on ‘confidentiality’ has meant that Parade organisers have repeatedly been presented with a negative determination wrapped up in human rights packaging, but with no idea of the nature or content of objections to the parade. This runs contrary to the principle of natural justice – a fundamental within the European Convention on Human Rights – where is a decision is made to your detriment that you should at least know the reasons on which that decision is based. ‘Confidentiality’ to that extent can never be a justifiable derogation from this fundamental right.

A Judicial Review was initiated in 2001/2002 or on the matter of Natural Justice, and was used by the Parades Commission during a Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Review (House of Commons) to defer questioning on this subject. Denied legal aid, as the case was considered to be on behalf of a group, the applicant for the Judicial Review appealed on the point of whether or not legal aid could be available to an individual member of a group affected by a ruling. If the Strategic Review were doing some homework, the outcome of either of these applications, if for no other reason than legal clarification, would have been noted.

Legal matters are not something the Review Group seems to wish the reader to dwell upon. The Report is written in such a way as to suggest that the 8 Step process is all very informal and matter of fact: and by the way there is a legally binding adjudication, but only at the end of the process.

If there is a final ‘legally binding adjudication’ on a parade, every step along the entire process is one of legal relevance. The confection that the early stages are in actuality ‘informal’ is either naïve or misguided. The 8 Steps suggested raises huge issues with respect to the burden placed on individuals being asked to engage in a process that is fraught with legal pitfalls.

The greatest concern must be the notion being proffered that somehow those who object to speaking to anyone who had been actively engaged in terrorist activity that might have a personal resonance would not have to do so. Really?

In rural areas, though not exclusively, an element of the terrorist campaign was to ensure that victims and families would be made aware of who had carried out attacks and yet walk with impunity within the community. This ‘in your face’ brashness increased a sense of alienation, embedded fear and increased insecurity among many Protestants; especially so in the border Counties. Rebuilding trust will take a great many years. Forcing ‘face to face’ encounters will not aid the healing process.

With a ‘legally binding adjudication’ it would not be enough to ‘believe’ or to ‘know’ that a person was involved in terrorist activity. It would have to be a fact; a proven fact in a court of law. It is also a fact that the clear up rate for Republican murders is no more than around 10%. Dialogue will be enforced no matter how unpalatable; even thought a cursory reading of the Strategic Review’s Report would suggest otherwise.

The Interim Consultative Report fails to make a compelling case for its 8 Steps. The suggested Step process fails to address the fundamental faults of the current Parades Commission. A legal minefield awaits unless the Review group undertakes a serious rethink of its entire approach.