2. Introduction

To people outside of Ireland the emotional and political energy invested in the issue of whether a group of bowler hatted, usually elderly men, bedecked in an array of collarettes (sometimes inaccurately referred to as sashes) should be allowed to parade down a particular street is incomprehensible. It seems the ultimate parody of what many observers feel about Northern Ireland and the Northern Irish: irrationality, emotionalism and brutality merged together, devoid of any reasonable content.

In fact, the issue of Orange parades and the routes they take goes to the very heart of the Northern state and its constitutional link to Britain. In no other democratic or western society would it be conceivable that the security forces of the state would force through a march or parade of one ethnic or religious group through that of another, especially one organised by an association whose primary reason for existence is to show hostility to the religious and political beliefs of the resident community. Parallels with marches of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Front in Afro or Jewish communities are not far fetched.

The Northern Ireland state is built around the concept of territory. When Ireland was partitioned in 1921 the border did not follow any principle of geography or ethnicity or politics. It was constructed on the simple principle of the maximum amount of Irish territory which the British state could hold within which a pro-union majority could be reasonably guaranteed. The unifying focal point for many within the pro-union majority in the North of Ireland was the Orange Institution or Order, an organisation which was first established at the end of the eighteenth century and which grew in power and influence over time. By the time that Ireland was partitioned the Orange Institution had become the main political organisation within the Unionist community. Its members formed the largest single block within the Ulster Unionist Council, the ruling body of the Ulster Unionist party, the party which governed Northern Ireland in what was in effect a one-party state until Stormont, the Northern Ireland Parliament, was abolished in 1972. Membership of the Orange Order was an essential prerequisite to political advancement within the Ulster Unionist party and the Government of Northern Ireland. All but three members of the various Ulster Unionist cabinets which governed Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1969 were members of the Orange Order. Many, such as the former Prime Minister Captain Terence O'Neill, belonged to both the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys' of Derry. Today a majority of Ulster Unionist MPs at Westminster are members of the Orange Institution, including the Rev. Martin Smyth, who as Grand Master of the Orange Institution is its leader. The Rev. Ian Paisley is a not a member of the Orange Order but he is a member of the Apprentice Boys of Derry.

Parades organised by the various `Loyal Institutions', a term used to described collectively the Orange Order, the Royal Black Preceptory and the Apprentice Boys' of Derry, are resonant with political as well as religious meaning. The Loyal Institutions are not only "protestant" in the sense that their members regard themselves in some sense as subscribing to protestant religious beliefs, but more importantly they are virulently anti-catholic. One very recent example of this are the comments made by Robert Saulters, a County Grand Master of the Orange Order as he spoke at the end of the Belfast parade on 12th July. He singled out for attack the Leader of the Opposition and Labour party in Britain, Tony Blair, a member of the Church of England, for both having married a Roman Catholic as well as having recently attended mass and receiving communion. Mr Saulters spoke of the "gutless men in Westminster" and then went on to say that Tony Blair had :

"already sold his birthright by marrying a Romanist and serving communion in a Roman Catholic Church. He would sell his soul to the devil himself. He is not loyal to his religion. He is a turncoat."

Orange parades, then, are not primarily religious statements though for some they are. For the majority of marchers it is a political affirmation of Unionism, a point conceded by the Rector of Drumcree, the minister of the Church of Ireland Church where the initial stand-off between Orange paraders and the RUC took place. He described the confrontation and parade as having political origins rather than any religious aspect. (Reported in the Irish News, 29 July 1996). Orange parades, particularly on the 12th July, are primarily political events with speeches given by leading members of the Ulster Unionist party or, in the case of the smaller Independent Orange Order, by Ian Paisley and other prominent members of the Democratic Unionist party. Highly political motions, written by the leadership of the Orange Order, are read out and passed, without discussion. These motions usually reaffirm loyalty to the Queen of England as well as subscribing to the latest Unionist orthodoxy such as opposition to the Anglo-Irish agreement or "Dublin rule". The Apprentice Boys' of Derry, though it no longer has any formal links to the Ulster Unionist party, is nevertheless avowedly unionist in character and sees itself as such. Representatives of the Apprentice Boys have attended planning meetings organised by Ian Paisley aimed at forging a unionist forum in opposition to current British Government policies. All this needs to be assimilated if people from outside Ireland are to understand why non-unionists within Ireland as well as members of the Roman Catholic Church find the Loyal Institutions offensive and sectarian in character. Their desire to march in non-unionist and perceived catholic areas is seen, rightly in our view, as triumphalist.

Parades organised by the various Loyal institutions have never been totally free from controversy. The Apprentice Boys of Derry played a key role in precipitating the street disturbances which are now widely seen as being the start of the present phase of the conflict. In October 1968 the Apprentice Boys of Derry announced its intention to organise a counter-parade in Duke Street, Derry when it was learnt that the Civil Rights Association had organised a civil rights march for Saturday, 5th October. This provided the necessary excuse for the then Minister for Home Affairs, William Craig, to ban both marches. The Civil Rights Association went ahead with their demonstration and the brutality of the RUC response and the street battles which followed in the Bogside were widely reported throughout the world. Ten months later, in August 1969, the Apprentice Boys annual parade in Derry provoked widespread opposition and precipitated the battles between members of the RUC and Derry nationalists in the Battle of the Bogside. After three days of street fighting a temporary peace was restored by the introduction of the British Army to streets of Derry and Belfast. Twenty seven years later the troops are still active in Northern Ireland and played a major role in the response of the security forces during the Drumcree crisis and particularly in Derry.

The recent conflict over the route of Orange parades can be dated to the early 1980's when opposition began to build up to Orange parades passing down the Obin Street and Tunnel areas of Portadown. In 1987, in the face of opposition of the Orange Order, the RUC decided to re-route these parades down the Garvaghy Road, a large nationalist area of Portadown. Opposition to the parades going down the Garvaghy Road continued until 1995 when the first Drumcree stand-off occurred. This occurred when on Sunday 9 July 1995 the Portadown Orange Order refused to be re-routed away from the Garvaghy Road by the RUC when they had finished their service at the now infamous Drumcree Church. There was considerable violence, including the firing of plastic bullets, and disruption throughout Northern Ireland (for example Larne harbour was blocked) associated with this stand-off in Portadown. Eventually an agreement was brokered by the Mediation Network involving the Garvaghy Road Residents Association, the local Orange Lodge and the RUC. Part of the agreement included an assurance given to the Mediation Network by the current Deputy Chief Constable of the RUC Ronnie Flanagan that the Orange Order would never again be allowed to parade down the Garvaghy Road without the consent of the local residents. That assurance was flagrantly breached this year.

The other main centre of opposition to parades by the Loyal institutions has been within the nationalist community based on the Lower Ormeau Road in south Belfast. While there had been some opposition to Orange parades in the area, the campaign by local residents became particularly focused and important when five local residents were brutally murdered in a bookmaker's shop in February 1992 by members of the south Belfast Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the largest loyalist paramilitary organisation. Subsequently a number of members of the Orange Order made five finger gestures at local residents as they passed the bookmaker's shop on an official Orange Institution parade. Since then there has been persistent local opposition to all Orange, Royal Black and Apprentice Boys parades down the Lower Ormeau Road. Many of these parades have now been stopped by the RUC but significantly two key parades, the 12th July parade of Orangemen and the 12th August parade of Apprentice Boys, en route to the main Apprentice Boys parade in Derry, have been forced through by the RUC in the face of solid opposition by residents. In order to achieve this, as was so graphically demonstrated on 12th July this year, the RUC have adopted the tactic of corralling residents into the side streets off the Lower Ormeau Road and imposing a virtual curfew on the residents. They are also prepared to use strong arm and violent tactics, including the use of plastic bullets to clear nationalist demonstrators from the area as they did on the 12th August 1995.

Last year, when it became clear that the RUC would allow the Apprentice Boys of Derry to parade along the west walls in Derry for the first time since 1969, local opposition became vocal and led to demonstrations and protest. Whilst there had been begrudging acceptance of the right of the Apprentice Boys to parade in the city centre, there was widespread support for those who were opposed to the Boys parading on those sections of the walls which overlooked the nationalist Bogside area passing as close as ten yards to one of its streets.

The decision of the RUC to force through the Orange Institution parade in July of this year down the Garvaghy Road has clarified for many people, including a significant number of protestants and unionists, their opposition to Orange and Loyal institution parades in nationalist or mixed areas. The basis of this opposition is due to the assurances which many people believed had been given at the time of the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993. This was expressed in the phrase "parity of esteem", now widely used. Behind the concept of parity of esteem is the belief that the only future for the two communities (or traditions) on the island of Ireland is one in which both nationalists and unionists must feel that the integrity of their communities is assured and that their religious and political beliefs will be valued equally and treated as legitimate. Forcing Orange and similar parades through nationalist areas against the will of local residents is rightly seen as a quite flagrant breach of the principle of parity of esteem and, at a stroke, reaffirmed for nationalists the widespread belief that within the Northern state they are regarded as second-class citizens, not only by the Unionist and Orange leaderships, but, more importantly, by the British Government itself.

The decision by the RUC, with the clear and unambiguous support of the British Government, to force through the Orange parade down the Garvaghy Road has also brought to the fore a number of the other important issues, addressed in part by this report, concerning policing and the development of a society which values and affirms a culture of human rights - rights which are guaranteed to all the citizens of the jurisdiction and all its communities.

The three residents groups which have been leading the campaign against Orange parades have consistently argued that at the heart of the conflict over parades is a principle which should apply to all marches and parades, and that is the principle of consent. If institutions like the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys wish to parade in certain areas, and in particular residential areas like Garvaghy Road and the Lower Ormeau, then they must first win the consent of local residents. Currently that consent is not there and so they should not be allowed to parade in those areas until such time as it is. Whilst valuing the right of all to demonstrate peacefully, the Pat Finucane Centre believes that the principle of consent is the only acceptable principle by which to decide on the issue of contentious parades. Currently the Loyal institutions rely on the RUC, a police force with historic links to Unionism and to Orangeism, to force through their parades. (A staggering high 92% of serving RUC officers are protestant. A number of the few serving catholics within the RUC are former british soldiers and originated from Britain itself.) This is no longer an acceptable basis for deciding whether parades can or cannot take place. If a meaningful peace is to built in the North of Ireland it can only be built on the principle of consent applied to all.

A major conclusion of the report is the unacceptability of the RUC as a police force which can win the confidence and support of both communities. In the aftermath of the decision to force through the Orange parade the Secretary of State on several occasions on local radio claimed that had the Chief Constable not done so the RUC would have been overwhelmed and nationalist lives would have been lost. This is an extraordinary statement and calls into question the continued position of Patrick Mayhew as Secretary of State. It is a clear and unambiguous statement by their chief minister that the British Government cannot or will not guarantee the safety of nationalists (or for that matter law abiding unionists) within Northern Ireland. This defence of the decision of the Chief Constable goes much further than whether or not the RUC are, or can be, an impartial police service. It is a statement of admission that in the final analysis the British state is either unwilling or unable to defend a significant section of its citizenry.

Our report goes further and demonstrates very clearly that the RUC is a sectarian police force which should not have the support of any section of the community in Ireland or Britain. Our report shows that once the decision had been made by the Chief Constable to force through parades in both the Garvaghy Road and the Lower Ormeau Road, the officers of the RUC unleashed on the nationalist community an appalling and vicious level of violence which should be unacceptable in any civilised society. Our report, which has a limited focus on the way Derry was `policed' both before and after Drumcree, demonstrates the level of violence committed by the RUC, especially and particularly on the nationalist community was sustained and immense. Plastic bullets, which are lethal weapons, were fired indiscriminately and in ways calculated to kill and maim young people. Our report also shows that the RUC frequently broke their own guidelines with regard to the firing of plastic bullets, including using them in situations where lives were not at risk, firing at targets above the waist and at head height, and firing at people who were going about their lawful business.

Our report also shows that the RUC, far from containing unrest, actually initiated the series of events which led to three nights of rioting in Derry and which caused some serious damage to the city centre. Furthermore the unnecessary death and murder of Dermot McShane, crushed by a British Army saxon, also had the effect of heightening tension and provoking street fighting. Our report also shows that it was community leaders and particularly Sinn Féin political activists who actually helped contain the situation and eventually to end the rioting. Our report also shops that claims by the RUC concerning the extent of rioting in the city ("the worst rioting that Londonderry has ever seen") were obvious false and were given in a cynical and self-serving manner in an attempt to justify the enormous amount of plastic bullets which the British Army and the RUC had fired at civilians.

There is one further important point that needs to be made about the RUC and its role as a police force. For policing to be effective in any society, the police service requires the active co-operation and support of the overwhelming majority of the people it serves. Time and time again, as we gathered statements from eye-witnesses to the events described in the report, including those concerning the death of Dermot McShane, we found that the witnesses were not prepared to give their statements to the RUC. This was because they do not have any confidence in the impartiality and professionalism of the RUC. It cannot be a satisfactory state of affairs when a small group like the Pat Finucane Centre can collect more information about the suspicious death of a citizen than the official police force charged with the enforcement of law.

At the heart of establishing a new political dispensation in Ireland which both recognises diversity but values parity of esteem must be the decision to replace the RUC with a police service that is prepared without qualification to serve all the people and who will enforce the law without fear or favour yet in a manner which accepts the primacy of human rights and the need for all institutions of the state to be genuinely and properly accountable. Reports like this one can only have long-term value if they lead to change both in terms of policing and in society as a whole. The tragedy of the report that we have written is that much of it could have been written over twenty-five years ago. The people of Derry deserve a lot better from the agencies of the state than they have had in the past. The time is now ready for our political leaders to put the decommissioning of the RUC and the British Army at the very heart of the peace process with their replacement by a new, acceptable police service.

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