In a throwback to the mid-1990s, Sinn Féin supporters and others have today, resurrected one of the war cries synonymous with the most turbulent years of the northern conflict.
There is a contradiction here that must not be lost. When Michelle O’Neill returns to work as the First Minister for All, she will do so accompanied by the same PSNI close-protection officers who were being denounced by her party on the Garvaghy Road today. Her protection officers were probably earning a bit of overtime sitting in armoured vehicles nearby while the old “SS RUC” refrain rang out once again.
It wasn’t just the chant that brought me back to the flashpoints of Belfast, the Ormeau Road, the Springfield Road and elsewhere, where I had once rioted with many others against the imposition of Orange marches. The faces on the picket line remained remarkably familiar too. Old, jaded IRA and Sinn Féin men and women who had once fought the RUC on the streets were there again, wider of girth and greyer of hair, but occupying ground, that to the outsider, seemed strangely unchanged. But something fundamental had changed. Their purpose today was to police the peace rather than encourage resistance.
That Michelle and company have been blindsided once again, this time by a loyalist activist, says something about the depth of strategic thinking within the party. A young loyalist previously mocked and dismissed by Sinn Féin has succeeded in making himself the focal point for nationalist and republican anger and blame.
Jamie Bryson is not old enough to remember the Troubles or to have experienced at first hand the violence and disorder unleashed around Drumcree and the other marching flashpoints of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet he has become the pantomime villain to Sinn Féin’s Cinderella: a convenient malevolent character upon whom an altogether more complicated plot can be pinned.
Because the truth is considerably harder to take, particularly for those of us who wanted to give the Good Friday Agreement a fair wind. Jamie Bryson, Stephen Nolan and Carla Lockhart did not invent sectarianism, it has never gone away and that is because the Good Friday Agreement has failed.
It has failed because, primarily, its architecture was designed to end a war rather than to build a peace.
We all assumed back in 98 that the ending of conflict marked the arrival of peace. We were wrong, ending a war is not the same thing as building a peace.
The GFA has not failed because its institutions were inherently incapable of functioning, nor because one community was uniquely responsible for frustrating its promise. It failed because it mandated the continuation of the war by other means, it embedded sectarianism into the fabric of Government and it failed because it gave us the illusion of power sharing without the need to give anything.
The deeper failure has been the spectacular absence of political leadership across the spectrum in the years since 1998. We created institutions incapable of managing our political disagreements and failed to confront the social conditions that continued to reproduce them.
Nearly three decades after the Agreement, sectarianism remains embedded in too much of our political and social life. We have not confronted sectarianism, racism and xenophobia. Culture and identity remain things to be defended against the other rather than shared with them. Human rights have too often become another weapon in the constitutional argument: embraced when useful and disregarded when they protect the rights of those with whom we disagree.
And there is another dynamic to what is happening on the Garvaghy Road today, and it is clear that Breandán Mac Cionnaith is alive to it. The people of the Garvaghy Road, and the Orange march itself, are proxies in a much wider political battle.
Once again, an issue involving rights, culture and competing identities is being drawn almost effortlessly into the old constitutional divide. The language coming from Sinn Féin and the DUP does little to suggest that they see political advantage in lowering the temperature. The institutions, that Sinn Fein signed up to, the police and the parades commission were supposed to provide a means of resolving these disputes, they merely brushed them under the rug.
For Sinn Féin there is an additional political context. Its abysmal record as the largest party in the Executive will inevitably be tested at the next Assembly election. Delivery on what was promised, what was achieved and what was not, should have dictated how people voted. But Garvaghy will change the debate into an election that everyone knows how to fight.
Today marks the beginning of next year's election campaign and indicates that, once again, it will be fought primarily along tribal lines rather than on the delivery of manifesto commitments. Unionism will be told that its culture and rights are under attack. Nationalism will be told that the old Orange state is reasserting itself. Each side will have its villain, its grievance and its call to the tribe.
We did not dismantle the battlefield. We built Stormont on top of it.
There is a contradiction here that must not be lost. When Michelle O’Neill returns to work as the First Minister for All, she will do so accompanied by the same PSNI close-protection officers who were being denounced by her party on the Garvaghy Road today. Her protection officers were probably earning a bit of overtime sitting in armoured vehicles nearby while the old “SS RUC” refrain rang out once again.
It wasn’t just the chant that brought me back to the flashpoints of Belfast, the Ormeau Road, the Springfield Road and elsewhere, where I had once rioted with many others against the imposition of Orange marches. The faces on the picket line remained remarkably familiar too. Old, jaded IRA and Sinn Féin men and women who had once fought the RUC on the streets were there again, wider of girth and greyer of hair, but occupying ground, that to the outsider, seemed strangely unchanged. But something fundamental had changed. Their purpose today was to police the peace rather than encourage resistance.
That Michelle and company have been blindsided once again, this time by a loyalist activist, says something about the depth of strategic thinking within the party. A young loyalist previously mocked and dismissed by Sinn Féin has succeeded in making himself the focal point for nationalist and republican anger and blame.
Jamie Bryson is not old enough to remember the Troubles or to have experienced at first hand the violence and disorder unleashed around Drumcree and the other marching flashpoints of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet he has become the pantomime villain to Sinn Féin’s Cinderella: a convenient malevolent character upon whom an altogether more complicated plot can be pinned.
Because the truth is considerably harder to take, particularly for those of us who wanted to give the Good Friday Agreement a fair wind. Jamie Bryson, Stephen Nolan and Carla Lockhart did not invent sectarianism, it has never gone away and that is because the Good Friday Agreement has failed.
It has failed because, primarily, its architecture was designed to end a war rather than to build a peace.
We all assumed back in 98 that the ending of conflict marked the arrival of peace. We were wrong, ending a war is not the same thing as building a peace.
The GFA has not failed because its institutions were inherently incapable of functioning, nor because one community was uniquely responsible for frustrating its promise. It failed because it mandated the continuation of the war by other means, it embedded sectarianism into the fabric of Government and it failed because it gave us the illusion of power sharing without the need to give anything.
The deeper failure has been the spectacular absence of political leadership across the spectrum in the years since 1998. We created institutions incapable of managing our political disagreements and failed to confront the social conditions that continued to reproduce them.
Nearly three decades after the Agreement, sectarianism remains embedded in too much of our political and social life. We have not confronted sectarianism, racism and xenophobia. Culture and identity remain things to be defended against the other rather than shared with them. Human rights have too often become another weapon in the constitutional argument: embraced when useful and disregarded when they protect the rights of those with whom we disagree.
And there is another dynamic to what is happening on the Garvaghy Road today, and it is clear that Breandán Mac Cionnaith is alive to it. The people of the Garvaghy Road, and the Orange march itself, are proxies in a much wider political battle.
Once again, an issue involving rights, culture and competing identities is being drawn almost effortlessly into the old constitutional divide. The language coming from Sinn Féin and the DUP does little to suggest that they see political advantage in lowering the temperature. The institutions, that Sinn Fein signed up to, the police and the parades commission were supposed to provide a means of resolving these disputes, they merely brushed them under the rug.
For Sinn Féin there is an additional political context. Its abysmal record as the largest party in the Executive will inevitably be tested at the next Assembly election. Delivery on what was promised, what was achieved and what was not, should have dictated how people voted. But Garvaghy will change the debate into an election that everyone knows how to fight.
Today marks the beginning of next year's election campaign and indicates that, once again, it will be fought primarily along tribal lines rather than on the delivery of manifesto commitments. Unionism will be told that its culture and rights are under attack. Nationalism will be told that the old Orange state is reasserting itself. Each side will have its villain, its grievance and its call to the tribe.
We did not dismantle the battlefield. We built Stormont on top of it.
⏩Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was a member of the Republican Movement until he retired in 2006 after 20 years of service. Fiche bhliain ag fás.
