The dangerous men and women of Garvaghy Road

“The Orangeman is a sufficiently funny person; and he is funny mainly because he is so serious.” Pádraig Pearse

In January 1998, a United Nations special rapporteur expressed grave concern for the life of county Armagh woman Rosemary Nelson; in September the same year, Nelson told a United States Congress committee on human rights that she had been subject to repeated death threats by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

The solicitor was deeply unpopular with the RUC mainly because she was so effective at defending her clients, among them residents of the Garvaghy Road who opposed Orange Order marches through their neighbourhood.

From May 1997, Nelson had also represented the family of Portadown man Robert Hamill, who died after being kicked into a coma in sight of a landrover-load of armed RUC officers. The day after the attack, one of the RUC men who’d been in the jeep called one of the men who’d bounced on Hamill’s head and warned him to wash his clothes.

In a newspaper interview published on March 15 1999, Rosemary Nelson said Robert Hamill “was targeted because he was a Catholic. We are seeing racism here, racism dressed up as sectarianism”. Hours later, Rosemary was dead, killed by a booby-trap bomb planted by a death squad.

Before her killing, Nelson had described her role as “trying to defend people’s rights when they have no state to defend them”, saying the atmosphere in which Portadown Catholics were forced to live was like a “toxic fog… reminiscent of the southern states of America in the 1950s and 1960s”.

Nine months before Rosemary’s assassination, 90 minutes drive away from Portadown, three Catholic children had been killed in an arson attack on their home after the Orange Order were finally banned from marching down Garvaghy Road.

Robert Hamill, the Quinn children and Rosemary Nelson were just five victims of the late 1990s campaign aimed at getting the people of Garvaghy Road and elsewhere in the North of Ireland to submit to sectarian supremacist parades, there were at least 16 others. The members of the Parades Commission maybe knew all these names when they released their determination last week that Orange men in uniform should be allowed down Garvaghy for the first time in 29 years. The commissioners are highly educated people and they no doubt considered many things and weighed and juggled them all before their decision, and they’ve taken a lot of flak for it since.

I’ve been thinking though. The parades commissioners and the judges who quickly backed them up and the police chiefs who told them they could get an Orange march down Garvaghy Road without a bother might deserve a break. I’ve been thinking, that if anybody is to blame for last week’s determination and what came after it’s the people of Garvaghy Road themselves. Blame should always be apportioned fairly and, in this case, if we’re being honest, it’s the residents who should take it.

It was they who reduced the Orange Order to a laughing stock. It was they, an isolated community of a couple of thousand, who took on an institution that had once run the Northern Ireland state, and it was they who, when their homes were attacked and their neighbours shot and bombed and kicked to death and their legal representative slaughtered and three kids poisoned with fumes wouldn’t give up. It was they who broke the Orange Order with civil disobedience, patience and the weight of a simple, reasoned argument – leave us alone.

The people of Garvaghy, and other isolated, nearly always poor, Catholic areas, forced the Orange Order to shrivel up into a quivering deflated thing like it had been doused in buckets of holy water; they broke its god-fearing ramrod respectable back, they fought for their own dignity and a bit of control over their lives and in the process they gave the rest of us the air in which to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the Order: those quaint bowler-hatted, collaretted, ceremonial-sworded medallioned men out on their historic mission to “make all the traitors and croppies lie down”. So how could you blame the Parades Commission when they decided that 35 men in suits and ties and sashes should be allowed down Garvaghy on their roundabout way home from church?

 

Northern Ireland’s justice minister seems to get the logic. Naomi Long was 31 years married at the weekend, and she took time out to tell us how the people on Garvaghy Road were giving her bad memories on her big weekend. She then posted an appeal to the “Christians” of the Orange Order, saying she had more faith in them to act for the “greater good” than the law-breakers of Garvaghy.

The crucible of the Orange Order lay in pogrom, but that was a long time ago now, much longer ago even than the killings of Hamill and Nelson, which had nothing to do with them anyway. The county Armagh countryside that surrounds the contemporary Garvaghy Road, where the loyal order was born and from where 7,000 Catholics were expelled in a two-month period leading up to its formation, is a different place today to what it was in the 1790s. If the pogrom was to be a recurring feature of life in the north-east of Ireland, one of the reasons was because it could always be shaped to meet the needs of the times.

Earlier this year, hundreds of refugees and migrants were forced to flee their homes in Belfast as far-right vigilantes went from street-to-street kicking down doors and setting fires. Amnesty International described the June pogrom as part of a longer pattern of racist agitation in the North of Ireland, “with each outbreak more serious than the last”.

A report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, attempting to depict the atmosphere surrounding the homes of many afflicted migrants and refugees, asked readers to “imagine living in the middle of a permanent BNP rally”.

The racist propaganda that has been kept at a steady drumbeat either side of these ‘outbreaks’ has been generated by a range of shadowy, usually creepy, new-age figures, many of whom emerged from the milieu of the Ulster loyalism that spent so many years violently agitating for the right of the Orange Order to march where they were not wanted.

Just a fortnight ago, a new campaigning website – Secure British Future – was launched with the declaration that “Loyal Ulster needs a new influx of True Brits, just as True Brits need a safe and truly British place for a decent, secure and happy future…”

The Irish News has reported that Secure British Future is linked to the Knights Templar International cult and its leader Jim Dowson, himself an estranged Orange man.

“Just a short flight or a few hours on a ferry, and you can start your new life in a place which is much more ‘British’ than anywhere on the mainland,” the website states above a photo of a loyalist flute band.

“You can think of it as going back fifty years to the time before the traitor politicians put the mainland on the road to disaster. Or you can see it as going forward, moving to a country dominated by our very special ‘White Tribe’.”

Dowson has cut his path through an assortment of far-right groups over the years, including the BNP and Britain First. In 2012, he led chaotic protests against the partial removal of the Union Jack flag from Belfast city hall and as a result appeared in court, dressed up as an Islamic fundamentalist, on charges of unlawful procession.

One of Dowson’s co-defendants during the flag protest trial and a colleague in the cos-playing was Jamie Bryson, a man who has since crusaded against everything from gay marriage to Irish language rights. Today, Bryson is the Orange Order’s chief legal adviser and spokesman.

“On one side, we have the law; on the other, we have the mob,” Bryson told a rally in Portadown on Wednesday night, attempting to distinguish between the Order and the people of Garvaghy.

“The law has to win, and the law winning means Portadown District coming home, and that is all that can happen.”

 

Jamie’s funny too, but he’s not stupid, and maybe he’s getting to the root of the danger here – when people overturn the state of things as they are, sometimes called the law, they get notions about themselves.

The next time you’re tempted to blame commissioners, judges or cops for whatever happens in Portadown, remember it was the people of Garvaghy Road who left us laughing at the wee men with their hands on the malfunctioning controls behind the great Orange machine. It was the people of Garvaghy who despite the suffering left the tears tripping us at the high farce of supremacism when it enters its death spasms. People who can manage something like that are dangerous.

I’ve met some of these people and I’m warning you, mother of suffering Christ, they’re relentless. They wouldn’t let you sleep for thinking about them and the way they’re probably sitting, in the dark, smoking, thinking about breaking the law. If they broke the Orange Order once, the bastards will do it again.

Unsubscribe