The long walk home

 

Every July, the Orange Order attends a church service in Drumcree and then faces the great question of our age: how to get home. It’s a mile-long walk, and the Orangemen have had roughly thirty years to work out an alternative route. They have declined to use any of them.

The logic is admirable in its simplicity. The Order has walked this road since 1807, so it will walk it again, or at least stand at the bottom of it looking wistful. It is the only known example of a parade whose entire purpose is to be stopped. Other marches aim for a destination. This one aims for a barrier, a line of police, and a well-lit spot for the evening news.

The Parades Commission, meanwhile, has said no so consistently that it could do it in its sleep and probably does. Each year it publishes a determination that is read with the solemnity of a papal bull and ignored with the enthusiasm of a terms-and-conditions page.

The British Army once dug a trench across the field to keep everyone apart, which is a bold response to a disagreement about a pavement. Prime ministers have been drawn in. Secretaries of state have been drawn in. At some point in the 1990s, someone must have said, “Surely we can all just go home by the other road,” and been gently escorted from the room.

The residents of Garvaghy Road, for their part, have spent decades being asked to host an event they were never invited to. Imagine a neighbour insisting on holding their annual barbecue in your kitchen, on principle, because his grandfather did.

The stand-off is now less a dispute than a tradition, with its own rituals: the statements, the standing, the solemn withdrawal at dusk. It is the world’s slowest walk. Somewhere out there, a very small bus is still waiting.