by Levee
How I Single-handedly Solved The Parades Problem
10:38 pm in Northern Ireland: Politics by Levee
OK, I haven’t technically sorted out the long-running Parades issue just yet, but I think I’ve got a viable blueprint, provided the communities in question have the leadership and resolve to pull it off.
So, Let’s Work Out The Grievances
The Orange Order are the parading Kings (and Queens) of Northern Ireland. They organise more expeditions per year than your local hiking group and are generally well-attended by certain sections of the community.
These Parades don’t exactly knock the socks off some Nationalist residents, who steadfastly refuse to allow parades to pass through ‘their’ areas. And no wonder. We only have to look to the violence on the Springfield Road last year when marchers were denied access to the Whiterock. Would you want those yahoos ripping tiles off your roof and smashing up your car?
But then, is it possible that Nationalists are provoked into reacting by their local resident’s groups? I mean, if managed properly how long would a parade take to pass through the area? An hour, two at most. Better still, instead of pretending to be prisoners in your own home, come out and support the parade because you can. If you must get caught up in symbolism, let it be positive.
Right, are you with me so far? In summary: Orange Order – your entourage is carrying too much riff raff. Nationalist residents – you’re getting too shirty about a parade that’ll have passed in an hour.
The Spirit Of Reconciliation
OK. Swallow hard people, this is where we have to accommodate.
Orange Order & Guests: Leave the rabble behind. It may be the Queen’s highway, but this is a bridge building exercise. If anyone on the day looks like they’re geared for trouble, tell them to watch the parade via BBC1 or meet you down the Kneebreakers later. Likewise, anyone with terrorist connections should probably stay at home too.
The people of the Nationalist area you are proposing to walk through aren’t thrilled about the music. Perhaps an appropriate silence as you pass through would be a fitting mark of respect.
On the plus side, if all goes well this year, next year’s parade will be a doddle to organise and we might not need the Parades Commission to intervene.
Nationalist Residents: You are inviting the Protestant people into your area under friendly terms. Don’t underestimate the significance of this.
I’d like to see a welcoming gesture at the interface, with a selection of members of the community greeting the parade as it begins to pass through. Perhaps a banner celebrating the occasion and welcoming the parade through and an appropriate photo op handshake between the leader of the parade and one of the residents.
To come back to the issue of disenfranchisement from September, it might show that the two areas aren’t all that different. It might show Protestants that West Belfast Catholics live much the same way and have similar lifestyles. It’s not Beverley Hills on the Falls Road compared with Ethiopia on the Shankill!
A Model For The Future?
Am I being stunningly naive as usual? Are both parties so consumed by bigotry that they don’t want a solution to this? Or are they simply allowing themselves to be stirred up by their ‘community leaders’?
Not to blow my own trumpet, but I think this is a fine model for peaceful parades in Northern Ireland. On both sides.
No-one can ‘win’ the parades issue. It is something that recurrs every year and isn’t likely to stop. The best that everybody can hope for is a peaceful compromise.
The OO is an anti-Catholic Organisation. When it sorts that out, maybe we can get the welcome banners.
You miss the poiny – it doesn’t matter it passes in an hour, the symbolism is about who is top dog. The only stirring up Resident’s commitees do is of the sort where people realise they don’t have to take it anymore.
Typpically, where dialogue is tried, and proper respect accorded, things are worked out to the satisfaction of all – see the ABOD. But where people refuse to talk, where there is no respect, then there is trouble.
Solution: Respect is needed. if anyone refuses to talk to anyone else, you lose instantly. Once you have respect in the process, then you can start working on other things.
Good post, levee. Let all involved take note. BU.
My favoured solution is to enrol the likes of Linford Christie
or some other sprinters.
Stick a sash on them, they could be down the Garvaghy road in about 20 seconds.
Technically then, an orange sash has made its way down the road, the residents blinked and missed it, everyone is happy.
Before I take your lecture on how to live with parades
do you live in an area where an unwanted one happens (or any parade)? Out of the estate, round the corner and down the road doesnt count.
Sometimes people pontificate on these issues while managing to live lives that never really experience.
Worse is people who move out of affected areas then proceed to impart external wisdom on the masses.
The same things arent always comparable. You middle class lush.
Fuck the OO and their coat-trailing UVF/UFF scum, they arent welcome until they ask.
Nice try Mr L, I think we’re all too fond of our prejudices.
Folks
This post has been applauded and derided in equal measure. Funnily enough, the nasty comments reflect more on the commenter than on me.
Bitter old rhetoric has got us precisely nowhere in the last few decades. Why are you people unwilling to try a different approach? What are you afraid of?
Kensei: I take your point, but my argument is about win-win, not who’s top dog around here. Ever heard of taking the high road?
EC: I’m a middle class lush? Cool.
“Kensei: I take your point, but my argument is about win-win, not whos top dog around here. Ever heard of taking the high road?”
I don’t believe you can take the high road until you have some measure of equality. Else it is just lying down in the face of agression. There can be no win-win until the OO talk to the residents. Allowing an anti-Catholic organisation down after some negotation would be enough of a high road for me.
kensie
What about all the nationalists, standing on their doorsteps,
arses showing, as the parade passes. Painted orange of course,
around the crack. Would that be cool
Kensei: You think I haven’t covered those angles? All sides would have to compromise with this proposal. The Orange Order would have to swallow hard and tell the redneck element to stay away, and as a mark of respect they would parade in silence through the neighbourhood.
Let’s get this straight – I deplore marching bands! The music stinks, there’s aren’t any lyrics, and those bloody whistles/flutes drive me nuts.
But the payoff is what counts. The future of parades. They’re not going to go away, so the only viable alternative is to defuse the tensions, show respect and change the culture.
The only reason that parading in Northern Ireland is such a big deal is because people make it a big deal.
And apart from Parsifal’s helpful comments, I haven’t seen a single commenter suggest a workable alternative. As usual, we’re all too concerned with bitching and negativity. Depressing.
Mr Levee
I applaud your intentions and efforts.
As someone who loves Orange parades, I suspect that a lot of my enjoyment comes from the fact that those that I attend have been Rossknowlagh and in Fermanagh and there is very little (if any) trouble. If there were to be a significant presence of those just looking for trouble or to antagonise I suspect that that enjoyment would be eroded in direct proportion the trouble.
The only vaguely negative that I remember from 12th July parades was one year a reverend gentleman had set himself up is a wee podium (Pulpit) and was giving it hot and heavy on the iniquities of the Church of Ireland.
I forgot to give you my suggestion for the contentious marches was to invite the Orangemen and woman from the worldwide network. Having a good spread of visible ethnic minorities, including Native American chiefs would have given it a more fun atmosphere and would have disconcerted anyone from whatever perspective who was hoping for trouble.
levee well done for tackling the subject.
I honestly get similiar ideas, and then they almost
always hit the wall that divides.
Can we think of a way to tear down the wall
like was done in Berlin in 1989.
Only this wall is in the mind.
Slainte.
Aileen… I live in a 76% nationalist town in Fermanagh that Im sure you know very well.
We dont want your marches, we dont want your flags and we dont want your bloody sermons.
Take yourselves off to Lisbellaw or Ballinamallard and have the time of your lives, but NOT at our expense.
Oh and as to why people in Fermanagh dont object lol….well remember what John Taylor once said – ” You get a better class of croppy near the border”.
Thing is, us croppies arent for laying down no more massa.
“And apart from Parsifals helpful comments, I havent seen a single commenter suggest a workable alternative. As usual, were all too concerned with bitching and negativity. Depressing.”
I told you my alternative: talk to each other. The people can work it out for themselves. I don’t presume to know the best way to sort out unique problems.
Sorry Kensei, I may have assumed you were being sarcastic or presenting barriers. I agree that discussion is only right – perhaps this post will provide a different angle of approach.
I should mention that I sent an email to the Parades Commission and the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland asking for reactions to this. Predictably, they have not bothered to respond.
And in the interests of disclosure, I don’t know enough about the Orange Order and the reason for all these marches. I’d like to, though.
I don’t like conflict. It only polarises people and forces them to choose sides. Let a parade pass with good grace and let the media report on that for once. Let the people of Northern Ireland know that co-operation is possible and can happen in the most divided of communities.
The only people who won’t support this are the people who feel safe in their bigottry and don’t need or want a solution.
If you agree with what I’m saying, point the Parades Commission, Orange Order, your political representatives to this article and ask them to start the healing. Today.
There will be a marching season this year, and 2007, and 2008 and so on. Time to find a positive solution, once and for all.
Why can’t the Orange Order and the Loyalists come out and state that they have no objections to Nationalist parading through “Their” areas, as it is put by Mr Levee.
Nationalists have over the years been BANNED from parading in most areas and have only in the last 10-15 years been able to parade into Belfast City Centre so it can’t be unreasonable for them to not want people who have done their best in killing them to have the freedom to parade over them!
The Equality issue needs to be tested to the full and so Nationalists should organise parades through Unionist areas to see if there is true Democracy and Equality or whether the legialation it is not worth the paper its written on.
If Nationalist from Ligoneil wanted to parade into Belfast along the only road that can get them there would the Unionists living along the 500m stretch of road that they would have to go down accept them? would they be OK with the Nationalists parading 150m past their homes and then getting on a bus to be taken to other locations?
>p>
Would the Unionist people who live on a 150m stretch of the Springfield Road object to Nationalists from Ballymurphy and the Upper Springfield taking a direct route past their houses to get to the Falls Road or would they be accommodating?
Pat, you seem to be approaching this issue from the Nationalist viewpoint, but the principle has to apply both ways.
I agree, Nationalists should have the right to walk down those stretches of road. But the same rules apply – no troublemakers, and respectful silence as they pass.
Hell, even Gerry Adams has formally endorsed the right to parade. Why are we still covering old ground?
It is admirable that you are attempting to change things, Mr. Levee.
The point is made comical in the title of your entry, of how you
single-handedly solved it. It will take more than one person working at it.
It makes me think about marches and parades in general. Some commeorate, and some are initiations toward change, such as the marches of Dr. Martin Luther King here in the USA. My favorite parade scene in a movie would have to be the one at the end of “National Lampoon’s Animal House”.
The idea of silent passage through areas inflamed from ages
of tension sounds respectful, but how do you keep the “riff-raff”
out? That sounds like it would have to be self-enforced, when
the citizenry who’s neighborhood would be subject might suggest something more objective.
I have to ask, what is the point of parading through a Catholiv neighborhood except to collectively thumb one’s nose across history? Seems to me the very act is enshrining hatred, and so seems pointless and anything but Christian.
If everybody weren’t so personally segregated then it wouldn’t matter where the marching went, and would probably be seen as passe’.
I’m picturing a performance artist, a la New York’s likely intelectual esoterica, lining up a thousand treadmills somewhere and reeling
two sceneries past the whole entourage in a synthetic march
experience.
(your or my browser window is all out of kilter at this writing, The right margin being open-ended).
Mr Levee
In a normal society where everyone was 100% committed aiming towards building a just and fair society, then your proposals would work.
Northern Ireland is far from being that.
Most of the people we’ve heard from here are from a nationalist background.
As a unaligned Unionist, I’ve got to say that I haven’t got a great deal of respect for some of the things which the OO have got up to in the last few years.
I do, however, also feel that we are in the middle of a Cold War, a battle for cultural supremacy, that is being fought by both sides with equal viciousness.
IMO the OO are the first and weakest link in the British chain that Sinn Fein and Irish Republicanism in general is attempting to break.
If the OO falls then what will be the next target? Remembrance Day?
Do I feel confident that Sinn Fein and the majority of the Republican and nationalist community respect my right to my British identity? No and that answer coming from someone who would classify himself on the more liberal wing of Unionism should at least make them think a little further where the present campaign of cultural apartheid is taking us all.
Do we only want to permit the expression of the majority culture in each village , town and city in Northern Ireland? That would seem to be the opinion of most the nationalists in this thread. In that case, then we are heading for even more residential and cultural segregation.
A final small question for Henry. A march was held by S fermanagh by local Republicans at Easter time to Commemorate Seamus McElwaine.
Bearing in mind his history, do you think this was appropriate?
Sorry, that last question was for derek de kont.