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.

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.

“At one end of the Ardoyne shop fronts a group of people hurled bricks, bottles, and petrol and blast bombs at the police. At the other end of the shop fronts stood another group impatiently waiting for their turn to enter the stage. Neither side was willing to be outdone by the other. Whichever dominates gets to say who does or does not have access to the short stretch of main road in front of some shops.

Both groups are Republicans, both made up of a mixture of local figures and others from further afield, and both believe they have a right to control and grant permission to walk along “their” road. In reality, a power play: desiring the power as to who gets to say no to the Unionists, the Protestants, the enemy; but also, who ‘controls’ the Ardoyne, “their community”.

One banner said “make sectarianism history”, with spokesmen telling us that they don’t want parades along “their” road.  Yet these same spokesmen would condemn those who said they didn’t want ‘them’uns’ in their community. What difference between sectarianism and racism? Fine words of condemnation mask base emotions of hate, exclusion and intolerance.

Both sides believe they represent “Republican” ideals, while both show obvious disrespect for their Protestant neighbours who in the past have been routinely demonised by republicans to challenge policing, and now demonised to gain advantage in an internal republican conflict. The rioting to order, the bus organisation, the empty condemnations and deflection of blame has been seen before – Ormeau being the last example where the majority of those later charged for disorder offences were from outside South Belfast let alone a few streets south of the Ormeau Bridge.

Dialogue is the answer? We’d like to think so. But Ardoyne republicans, said by the Parades Commission to be capable of speaking for the Ardoyne ‘community’, have been engaged in dialogue with the North & West Belfast Parades & Cultural Forum for 3 years! Included in the NWBPCF talks’ team are senior members of the local Apprentice Boys and a District officer of the Orange Order.  The Protestant community of the area is speaking with one voice locally, through the Forum, but who speaks for the Ardoyne?

It is clear that the Republican power-play has little to do with the Ardoyne community.  If dialogue about parades is about accommodation, including tolerance and respect, then perhaps three years of talking should by now have provided everyone with breathing space to move on.  While the Protestant community is demonised and abused, its culture denigrated and diminished on the back of Republican political manoeuvrings, it is the Ardoyne community that suffers while the thugs take over its streets and steal its voice.

Meanwhile, last Monday evening, less than a hundred yards from the Ardoyne shops Protestants stood patiently in Twaddell and Hesketh waiting for the homecoming parade of local Lodges.  Once the PSNI escorted the parade up the road, the Protestant community went home peacefully.

There is a lot of talk of ‘respect’, ‘rights’, and ‘shared future’.  How do Republicans expect to be respected, when a parade that would take no more than two minutes to pass Ardoyne shops is denied respect.  What rights are defended through violence against peaceful cultural expression? What shared future, when less than a hundred yards of road is claimed territorially as ‘ours’?  Sectarian apartheid is not a future of any sort! In what world is are three nights of riots a proportional response to a two minute walk past some shops?

Looking at the events in Ardoyne, is there any real difference between ‘dissidents’ and Sinn Fein other than rhetoric?  Hard to tell. Springfield, Ormeau, Dunloy, Rasharkin, Ardoyne: the difference is time and scale. Republicans share the common goal of keeping Protestants out of sight out of mind: to each hold the power to dictate cultural expression; to create a territorial exclusion zone.  Sectarian, racist, or just criminal thuggery –words and actions add up to the same difference at the Ardoyne shops.

Blaming the Loyal Orders for nights of rioting, and more generally for everything, deflects attention from the battle raging within Republicanism. However, deflecting attention and looking outside for the boyeymen, makes it even harder to provide the Ardoyne community a voice it needs to find toleration, respect and accommodation with its Protestant neighbours.”