AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
If you want to see sectarianism in action look no further than the 35 Orangemen who want to march the Garvaghy Road in Portadown and the Republican residents who oppose them. It’s an insidious ‘them and us’ division which can affect everything from failure to provide effective government in the Northern Ireland Assembly to personal history.
A ghoulish form of tourism sprang up in the 1990s in Belfast in the wake of the paramilitary ceasefire. Known as Troubles Tours, curious people came from around the world to see at first hand places that had dominated their TV screens for more than 20 years.
It might seem grimly voyeuristic to view sites like Frizzell’s Fish & Chip Shop in the Shankill area where nine innocent people were blown to pieces and 50 injured by an IRA bomb. The most poignant thing for me on a bus which toured everything from murals to atrocity sites was not the international tourists trying to comprehend but locals on the tour, some weeping to see parts of the city they had never dared to visit before.
That’s what sectarianism does, keeps people, the green and orange, apart. The love of my Protestant grandfather’s life was a young Catholic woman. Their families wouldn’t allow their marriage. Decades later after my grandmother died, he told me how, in his 80s, he had gone to find his first love. She had never married. That’s the saddening effect sectarianism has.
Unless you live there (I grew up there), it is hard to realise what a divided society the North was and still is. There were no Catholics in the schools that I went to and education is still largely segregated to this day which hardly helps integration. It doesn’t have to be that way. The Shankill (Protestant Shankill Road area) to Shankill (in County Dublin) project run by Co-operation North in the ’90s was intended to unlock the mistrust between divided communities. A group of primary school boys from the North arrived at a school in the South to meet their Shankill counterparts. The northerners had never been in a Catholic area before – they were apprehensive and initially kept apart. But within half an hour of discovering, thanks to a facilitator, that most of them supported the same soccer teams (Man United) and wore the same runners (Nikes) the boys relaxed and were talking and playing together.
Garvaghy Road, a republican area in predominantly unionist Portadown was one of the worst flashpoints during the Troubles, which saw heart-rending atrocities. No surprise that the Orange marches, seen as a form of triumphalism by some and a trigger for violence, have been banned from the road for the last 28 years. Incidentally, the significance given to the Battle of the Boyne between William III and his uncle and father-in-law James II is puzzling. The majority who fought in William’s army were Ulstermen but Dutch soldiers and mercenaries from Denmark, France and England. The battle of Aughrim 1691 was more decisive and Lambeg drums may have been introduced by the Duke of Schomberg’s troops.
The neutral seven-member Parades Commission, which has successfully settled other parade issues, may have believed old wounds had healed enough for a minor version of the Orange parade to proceed and gave permission for it go ahead. Not “incomprehensible”, as Micheál Martin put it, if you happen to believe that no-go areas should be a thing of the past. But it is all too evident that the parity of esteem evoked by the Belfast Agreement has not dawned in this instance.
We may hope for a united Ireland but there are some aspects of Northern Ireland that are far from united. The South has stood strongly against the horrors caused by differences in race and religion in situations like Apartheid in South Africa and Israel’s war on Palestine and destruction of Gaza.
Do we feel the same about the Garvaghy impasse? There, more than €3m worth of police presence has kept massed illegal protesters – egged on by Stormont’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill and SF leader Mary Lou McDonald – and the Orange parade apart. It’s a reminder of how much needs to be done in the North.
If we did feel the same we would want green and orange to walk the road together.
