MAD – that’s the acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, and it’s the basis on which the world powers with nuclear weapons operate. If you attack us with nuclear weapons, we’ll hit back and we’ll all die.
I remember a New Yorker cartoon years ago which caught the system rather well. It showed a Stone Age family looking miserable, crouched under a massive rock which was held in position by a stick with a rope around it. The caveman holding the rope is saying: ‘It’s called mutually assured destruction. If anybody comes in here, I pull the string.”
Amazingly, as the Eleventh Night shows its primitive head on the horizon, a stand-off with some similarities exists in South Belfast, off the Donegall Road. There, a massive bonfire has been built and is due to be set alight tomorrow evening. This, despite the fact that there two major health risks: a risk that the bonfire (due to be lit tomorrow night) will disturb the asbestos pile nearby and do serious and long-term damage to anyone in the area; and a risk that the electricity sub-station, which supplies two hospitals, will be damaged by the bonfire. Belfast City Council have voted against the igniting of the bonfire and the PSNI has been informed that this bonfire is both dangerous and illegal and should be dismantled.
So will the Orange celebrants ignore the advice of experts and the warnings of bonfire damage to the two hospitals? Or will they accept the health warning and dismantle the whole thing? My money is on the self-destructive pallet pile being set on fire.
To do otherwise would be seen as losing face, another nail in the coffin of Orange culture. So it may damage the health of local people, and even the health of people in the two hospitals, if the hospitals lost power even temporarily. That doesn’t matter. No fenian-leaning Belfast Council is going to tell the residents what to do, and if the cops try coming in to dismantle the bonfire before it’s lit, they’ll get one very hot reception.
We’ve had it with excuses for chipping away our Orange heritage. We’re MAD as hell and we’re not taking it any more!
Very good Jude free Palestine
Jude
You are an educationalist who taught both Protestants and Catholics. I wonder do you ever have anything positive to say about working class Protestant communities and their culture?
I am not in any of the Loyal Orders and I have no desire to be so. However, my wife teaches boys from the Greater Shankill. About 70% of the boys in her school are on free school meals / EMA. They come from homes where often there is not a father-figure and they are third generation unemployed. Quite often, the local bandsman is the only father figure they have and he often puts his own hand into his pocket to buy them a band uniform. They put great effort into their bonfires and it bonds them as a community. It is so easy to demonise and criticise. But where does it get us. It is the stuff of partitionism. It leaves many Protestants asking is the Orange in the ‘fleg’ just for show.
Derry Day is only a month away. Working class, marginalised Protestant communities in Tullyalley, Clooney, Fountain, Newbuildings, Irish Street, Nelson Drive et al see it as an important part of their culture. Bands from Derry like Hamilton, Churchill and William King have won global awards and put Irish piping and fifing on the world stage. I am looking forward to your positive comments about Derry Protestants raising the crimson high on Derry Day.