| Peace the Casualty When Orangemen March
Out By Ronan McGreevy
Rioting in Belfast has been a public relations disaster for Northern
Protestants, argues Ronan McGreevy.
It was, as the veteran RTÉ reporter Tommy Gorman put it, a “car crash
press conference”.
Senior members of the Orange Order in Belfast walked into a room in the
Shankill Road last week to face the waiting press and walked out with whatever
vestige of their reputation they had in ruins.
Outsiders looked aghast as the order tried to justify the unjustifiable.
Orange Order Grand Master Robert Saulters said the police were to blame
for four days of rioting and that his members were merely “protecting themselves”.
Some television news channels got to juxtaposing his words with the image
of rioting Orangemen, while another wielded a sword at police lines. Talk
about a PR disaster.
After four days when 116 vehicles were burned, 81 police officers were
injured and a 22-month-old baby had his skull fractured by a Loyalist mob,
the Belfast County Grand Master Dawson Bailie said he would “do nothing
different”.
What ever happened to the Order’s self-confessed propriety, loyalty to
the crown and “love thy neighbour”?
Instead, the order blamed the police, the Parades Commission, the British
Government and nationalists for the violence. They would have blamed it
on the boogie if it meant absolving themselves from responsibility.
Welcome to the infantile world of Northern Irish politics where there
is always someone else to blame and someone else picks up the tab.
That someone else is the British taxpayer who must be wondering yet again
why their taxes, £2.1billion a year and counting, are being siphoned off
to subsidise a place where mainstream politicians think that children throwing
blast bombs at the police is somehow excusable.
There hasn’t been an Assembly in the North for nearly three years, so
neither the electorate nor the elected have to account for their actions.
In grown up societies, politicians make tough decisions about the economy,
schools and hospitals and all the other accoutrements of modern life.
In the North, direct rule rules and everybody else can pontificate and
posture to their heart’s content. More than half of the electorate voted
for the DUP or Sinn Féin in the general election.
While the mainstream flirts with the extreme, two Welsh politicians,
an Essex MP, Angela Smith, and a Tory turncoat who once had a butler, Shaun
Woodward, get on with the real business of Government.
A recent poll conducted by The Sunday Times ought to be sobering reading
for Unionists. Only 30 per cent of the British electorate want Northern
Ireland to stay in Britain.
After witnessing events in recent weeks, that figure is probably now
a gross exaggeration. A poll down in the Republic found that only 56 per
cent of the electorate were in favour of a united Ireland — and it’s supposed
to be the cherished shibboleth of every Irish person.
Who would blame outsiders for thinking the place is not worth the candle?
Deep down Unionists know there is little empathy for their plight in
Britain. They know that the average Briton, if he or she bothers to think
about the North at all, thinks only in terms of bigotry and backwardness.
Unfair perhaps, but how could you not be sick in the stomach when looking
at the children rioters. Where were their parents, their teachers, their
mentors?
Unionists also know that a Labour British Government has no sentimental
attachment to the North and are there because they have to be there.
Their response though is loudly to protest their loyalty, while their
actions repulse the very people they claim to be loyal to.
When faced with a confident, self-confident and focused nationalist community,
the response of loyalists is not to engage in the powerful arguments they
could muster for the retention of the Union, but to revert to type as they
have done so often in the past.
As much as they loathe Sinn Féin, the Loyalist communities lack the long-term
vision and strategy, for better or worse, as offered by Gerry Adams and
Martin McGuinness.
Not one senior Unionist politician condemned the violence last week without
equivocation. In the North, there’s always a but.
We've heard a lot of talk recently about the alienation of Loyalist communities,
the perception in this depressing zero-sum game is that Catholic gains have
been at the expense of Protestants.
This, in a month, when the IRA is expected to start destroying its weapons
for good.
The IRA believed they could bomb the Protestant population into believing
that their interests were not served in preserving the union.
The IRA failed; this is a victory for unionism. They are just too self-absorbed
and self-pitying to see it that way.
The depressing thing about last week is that the threat of violence works
in the North as assuredly as violence does.
Whatever residual complacency anybody has had about the real status of
the peace process has been shattered.
The British Government would be stupid not to heed the message, but even
if they address the issues, unionists will surely find something else to
complain about.
The nuances of their grievances are lost on the vast majority of British
people. All they see are children rioters, sectarian attacks and they are
sick and tired of the excuses and the mayhem.
The last week has been a disaster for Northern Protestants. If they can’t
see it, they are in even bigger trouble than they know.
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