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TPQ
Kate Rice ✍ Like most people, my social media feed has recently been awash with news of protesters in Dover, Portsmouth, and other seaside towns, demonstrating against small boat migration and the RNLI’s "helping hand." 

The fallout from these actions hit a boiling point when the Portsmouth Lifeboat Station was forced to temporarily suspend its services due to the intense physical and online abuse directed at its volunteers.

Where I can usually form a coherent opinion on complex public matters, I find myself completely baffled by this. The RNLI has existed since 1824, and since its inception, it has been an entirely indiscriminate humanitarian service. Its founding ethos is to protect those in peril on the sea—full stop. There is no clause stating "protect as long as they look like us" or "protect as long as they hold the right documentation." Its only mandate is to save those who are drowning.

When I was a child visiting the seaside, the RNLI hubs were places of community and pride. Volunteers were always happy to show you the lifeboats and share stories of maritime history. They never spoke of a political agenda because they didn't have one; their sole focus was saving lives. To any normal person, this selflessness is admirable. So why are we now seeing crowds calling themselves "patriots" protesting heroic charity work, threatening good-hearted volunteers, and driving vital rescue operations off-service?

The forced closure of the Portsmouth station creates an undeniable hazard. On an immensely popular stretch of coastline, risks emerge every day for hobby sailors, windsurfers, families, and yes, migrants in small boats. The irony is that during the Portsmouth incident, RNLI volunteers even stepped in to ensure the safety of the protesters who had waded into the water to confront the arriving boat. The charity protects everyone.

This unconditional humanity isn't new. During the Second World War, the RNLI routinely rescued downed German airmen from the sea. They did so without stopping to check documentation, and without pausing to consider that these men were actively at war with their country. They saved them simply because they were human beings facing death in the water. Once safe on solid ground, the proper authorities took over.

This is exactly what happens on the rare occasions they assist small boats in the English Channel. It is not the purpose of a volunteer rescue crew to act as border enforcement or to assess legal status; their only job is to ensure a person doesn’t die when a tragedy is entirely preventable. Channel rescues make up barely more than one per cent of the RNLI's nationwide callouts, yet volunteers are being branded as "traitors" online and targeted at their stations. Demanding that volunteers stand by and watch people suffer or drown is, without question, inhuman.

All human beings possess a fundamental right to life and safety. The human condition must always take precedence over a political or legal status. Protests targeting a lifesaving charity are dangerous reflections of xenophobic rhetoric. The consequences of these actions do not just endanger migrants; they put the volunteers themselves at risk and threaten the legal citizens who rely on those same lifeboats every single day.

When does it end? Will these critics only be satisfied when more small boat crossings end the way it did for two-year-old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian child whose lifeless body washed ashore, becoming a horrifying symbol of global inaction and a heart breaking picture on the cover of our newspapers? We cannot allow political bias and bigoted anger to dictate who lives and who dies when the means to save them are readily available.

The RNLI and its lifesaving mission must be fiercely protected. To those standing on the shores shouting insults at rescue boats, I ask a simple question - will you only be satisfied when the tide brings in nothing but bodies to bury?

⏩Kate Rice is a peace baby.

Hating The RNLI

Geordie Morrow 🖌 with a painting from his collection of art work.

painted this on my release from prison, a colourless palette, the image of the two, myself and my right arm, the visit to our father, with our faithful Bruce, enjoying his dinner, a Frey Bentos steak and kidney by the light of the TV, acrylic on canvas 36”x30” 1977


⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

I Was So Much Older Then - I’m Younger Than That Now

Anthony McIntyre ☠ This month marks the third anniversary of Israel's genocide in Gaza. 

Since the nation of child killers invaded Gaza with one aim in mind - making Palestinian life unsustainable - the people of conscience involved with Drogheda Stands With Palestine have assembled each Saturday to protest the genocide and offer solidarity to the Palestinian people. 

The citizens of Drogheda are for the most part welcoming. The rare outbursts of hostility invariably come from those who claim to be Irish nationalists but who are in fact Irish racists. I usually tell them to put their hats on as woodpeckers are about. The colour form might be different from the hate filled bigots who are currently trying to have their march forced down Garvaghy Road. The Irish racists wave green, white and orange, the Portadown hate cabal's colour preference is red, white and blue. Don't be fooled by form or colour. The content is the same. Hate mongers eager to target people they deem children of a lesser god.

Since we gathered here last Saturday, the Irish national soccer team has most unfortunately turned out against Israel. A 3-0 victory over the child killers brings no consolation to those opposed to the game ever having being played. Even less to the besieged and beleaguered of Gaza. When Stop The Game tennis balls were hurled onto the pitch at the Aviva Stadium during Ireland's midweek game against Austria, the thought struck me that there were more balls thrown from the spectators than there are among the ethical eunuchs in the higher echelons of the the Football Association of Ireland. So, it was with a sense of pride that I watched our very own Joanna Byrne, who has stood with us in this very spot, tear strips out of the FAI for its refusal to withdraw from the game during an Oireachtas committee hearing into the handling of the fixtures. She quickly took the smirk from the smarmy face of Paul Cooke, the FAI President.

While it was good to see the Irish players refuse to shake hands with the team representing the genocidal state, and to wear black armbands, it was small consolation, style over substance. At the turning point the entire Irish team, bar one, failed to turn. Gavin Bazuna, alone chose to walk away from the child killers rather than play with them. The Irish squad was given the opportunity to vote on whether to play Israel or abstain. It chose to play and in doing so allowed the Israelis to claim that 'football has won.' Sport didn't win. Sportswashing did.

Also during the week I saw an image of a 94 year old woman, the human rights barrister Margaret Owen, being carried by a large group of British police officers. She was being forcibly removed from the British Labour Party conference because she protested genocide and supported Palestine Action. Like Gavin Bazuna she took a stand of substance, rather than opt for posture protest. Defend Our Juries, which organised the protests, said in a statement:

Inside the Labour party conference today, Ed Miliband will tell campaigners and party members that they were right to build political pressure over Gaza with their protests. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. If he means what he says, why are those taking a principled stand against genocide still being arrested as terrorists?

Like the FAI, the British Labour Party is big hat and no cattle.

The Irish soccer team stands to repeat its obscene abdication tomorrow evening and again take to the field against the child killers. They would do well to ponder the words of Dave Sherlock of the Stop The Game Coalition.

You can't play football with these people – you have government ministers standing up in their parliament and saying there are no innocents in Gaza, kill them all, kill the children because they'll only grow up to be terrorists.

For words such as these Dave Sherlock and Joanna Byrne, like the elderly supporters of Palestine Action, will be seen as the real problem. the message from the FAI: let's pillory the protestors and play the child killers.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.


Ethical Eunuchs

Brandon Sullivan 🎤 Ulster Said No, Loyalists Went on the Rampage: They’ve Lost every Fight They’ve Started Since

How this situation came about can be summed up as follows. In November 1985, the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland signed an agreement with Ireland. For the first time, Dublin had a say in the governing of NI - albeit an advisory role, Unionists were apoplectic with fury, and the “Ulster Says No" campaign was a launched. Whilst unionist paranoia had reached a fever pitch, there did seem to be a new determination on the security forces to face down loyalist street disorder. Or, to be more accurate, there seemed to be the political will to use the RUC to quell loyalist street disorder. Much, but by no means all of this, seemed to be in Portadown, more specifically, Obins Street.

For many years, Orange Order parades travelled through Obins Street on their way to Drumcree Parish Church. Nationalist residents increasingly objected to the marches, arguing that repeated loyalist parades through their area were intimidating and that they were not treated equally when seeking to hold St Patrick’s Day parades elsewhere in Portadown.

In 1985, tensions escalated following disputes surrounding parades in Portadown. In response to growing disorder, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) decided to prevent Orange Order marches from using the Obins Street/Tunnel route. In 1986, after further serious violence, the route was formally redirected. The Orange Order subsequently travelled towards Drumcree using the Garvaghy Road, which created a new and even more prominent dispute as more houses were built, which were occupied by Catholics.

At Obins Street, Unionist politicians could be heard saying to loyalist protestors that “Dublin’s giving the orders.” Ian Paisley himself, at a political event in June 1986, added to the increasing hysteria in his own tried and tested formulaic way: the BBC reporting that:

after accusing some of the police officers of mistreating him, Reverend Paisley shouted: "Don't come crying to me if your homes are attacked. You will reap what you sow".

Drumcree in the 1990s – Standing Up for God and Ulster

In the early hours of one summer morning, in the mid-1990s, a senior RUC officer walked to where a mother was standing with her young sons, who would have been about the same ages as the murdered Quinn brothers. The boys were wavering, tired, their eyes starting to close. The RUC man addressed the mother: “would you not be better off getting those wee boys home to bed?” The mother looked down and barked at her children “stand up straight for God and Ulster!” The incident stayed in the RUC man’s mind for many years after it happened.

The Orange Order, and violent loyalism was defeated at Drumcree. The “Orange Card” – which was basically “might is right” in the form of the threat of apocalyptic violence, never carried the same weight again. Loyalists tried it a few more times, with diminishing returns.

Obins, Drumcree, Harryville, Holy Cross, Flags… Loyalists lost every fight they’ve started.
Until 2026… and The Ruling by the Parades Commission

In decades to come, this will still be seen as the stupidest, most counterproductive decision taken by an entity in Northern Ireland. Conspiracy theories will abound as to why on earth close to 30 years of peace was upended by a decision.

But, the fact remains, that the Parades Commission made that decision. It ruled that 35 Orangemen could march silently, at 8am, down the Garvaghy Road.

The residents, and their supporters, blocked the road. In doing so, they adopted an approach which has some similarities to that which loyalists of the 90s took – they went for might-is-right. Let me head off any criticism of the comparison: there is a massive difference. Those on the Garvaghy Road are peaceful, are not threatening widespread murder and disorder, and are behaving in an unreproachable manner.

But they were happy with the Parades Commission until it made a decision they didn’t like, at which point they used sheer physical presence to prevent its decision being carried out.

Isn’t that hypocrisy?

Isn’t that what Bryson and Portadown LOL No 1 want?

Wouldn’t it have been better to let the 35 prize specimens waddle silently down a road and then take to the courts to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

My Tuppence Worth

I think the Chief Constable of the PSNI has a raft of issues, personal and political, that make him ill-suited to dealing with the situation that has unfolded. Within his ranks are Continuity RUC types, that probably dislike him as much as they dislike the residents of the Garvaghy Road. Could these officers have offered the Parades Commission some sort of false guarantees? Could this be about getting Boutcher to resign? Predictably, some are calling for it. Yet he won’t go. But he’s going to be having a bad week or two.

Jamie Bryson, on the other hand, will be delighted. He’d have been devastated if the Orangemen had got to go for a silent Sunday stroll.

Should nationalists have shown some magnanimous pathos and let the Orangemen take their heavily restricted walk?

This piece is designed to stimulate debate. I hope that it follows.

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

Should The Garvaghy Road Residents Have Allowed The Orange Order To March Down Their Road?

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Eleven

 

A Morning Thought @ 3282

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 9-September-2026.


We have had little over a month of a president who is perhaps both the most authoritarian and inept that the country has seen. His authoritarian zeal can be seen in his declarations and his macabre press conference strutting around between corpses. His ineptitude can also be seen in his national and international political management and his economic proposals. Meanwhile the opposition limps along.

De la Espriella promised war and though there is some sleight of hand in the figures and results, it is true that he is trying to project an image of a strong warlike president and so he gave the order to bomb some camps knowing that there were a number of minors there who died in the attack. Duque did something similar provoking a fierce row about the use of violence, International Humanitarian Law and the question of the unlawful recruitment of minors. Back then the Left denounced the attacks. But later when Petro was in power he did the same and his government left a death toll of 65 minors killed in bombardments.[1] Petro defended the attacks and the murder of minors.[2] Now under De la Espriella they see they sacrificed any moral authority by placating their egocentric leader, Petro, who in turn wanted to placate Donald Trump. An opposition bereft of ethics and incapable of thinking beyond tomorrow.

What was unusual this time was the press conference called by the Narcos’ lawyer where he strutted around amongst corpses in branded green clothing, radio in hand to communicate with nobody as if he were leading a military operation. But the display of corpses is not new, it has always been done. All the previous governments have done so. What distinguishes De la Espriella from the other presidents is that they left the macabre scenes to the generals. Do a simple search on the internet and there will be no lack of photos of corpses in white bags alongside recovered weapons.


The greater the number of dead, the more publicity, though sometimes a single corpse is enough for the media spectacle as was the case of the ELN commander, alias Samuel, who was killed by a sniper in the last weeks of Santos’ government. Just one corpse, but many soldiers for the ceremony and the spectacle, which is at the end of the day a type of televised media spot for the state’s forces. These spots continued under the Petro government, though in some cases the media, including El Tiempo and El Espectador used pixellated images.[3]


De la Espriella knows that he doesn’t face serious opposition in Congress. One of the politicians whose image has suffered the most is Uribe. He is under investigation for his criminal responsibility in various bloody events such as the massacre of La Granja (1996) where five people were tortured and murdered, the massacre of El Aro (1997) in which 17 people were tortured and murdered and also the murder of human rights defender and lawyer Jésus María Valle (1998). The less than honourable members of Congress of the Historic Pact voted in favour of impunity in these cases. They will say it is not so, but everyone knows that the attempt to take the case out of the hands of the Prosecutor’s Office, where it should remain by law, and pass it over to the corrupt Accusations Commission in Congress, is an act of impunity. Amongst those who voted this way is María José Pizarro, the daughter of the murdered guerrilla Carlos Pizarro, in a way representing, at least symbolically, that ex-M-19 current, and also Gabriel Becerra from the Communist Party. Corruption is not the work of just one current in the HP but rather an underlying problem in that organisation. In the face of public reaction they walked it back in their public statements, but it was too late and now it is up to the Constitutional Court to set out whether the corrupt members of Congress judge Uribe, as Pizarro and others wanted or whether the Prosecutor’s office continues with the case as it has demanded.[4] This means that a Colombian prosecutor is more honest about impunity than the Historic Pact’s members of Congress!

Meanwhile the NGO, Indepaz, has published its report on the first 30 days of De la Espriella’s government and so far there have been 16 social leaders murdered, five demobilised members of the FARC and ten massacres with a death toll of at least 30 people murdered.

Death in all its arrogance stalks the country and the Left is fighting amongst itself to please Uribe and lacks any moral authority to criticise the violence of the new president. This is how low they have sunk, those who think politics is about unprincipled electoral agreements, nepotism, personal management of votes in Congress and also reaching political agreements with Uribe over the corpses of yesteryear, paving the way for the murderers of today.

References


[1] El País (03/07/2026) La crisis de reclutamiento infantil que le deja Petro a De la Espriella: un aumento del 300% y 65 menores asesinados en bombardeos. Juan Miguel Hernández Bonilla. 

[2] Swiss Info (16/11/2025) Petro defiende bombardeo en el que murieron siete menores y rechaza comparaciones con Gaza. 

[3] See.

[4] El Tiempo (28/08/2026) Nueva Crisis en el Pacto Histórico por congresistas que votaron para trasladar caso del expresidente Uribe a Comisión de Acusaciones: ‘Inaceptable’. Laura Juliana Castellanos Guevara. 

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Colombia 🪶 The Opposition Limps Along Whilst The President Struts Around Amongst Corpses

Frankie McKillen ✍ Listening to Malachi O'Doherty talking about Maura Lyons on the BelTel podast, and the Catholic Church caught my attention, particularly when he turned to his own experience of growing up Catholic in West Belfast.

Maura's story is a fascinating one. In 1956 she was a fifteen-year-old Catholic girl from west Belfast who became attracted to evangelical Protestantism through people she met at work and converted to Free Presbyterianism. After conflict with her family over her conversion, she left home and was taken to Scotland by people associated with the Free Presbyterian Church. Her disappearance caused a sensation, with accusations that she had been abducted and Ian Paisley's name becoming closely associated with the affair. Paisley later played a recording of Maura at a packed Ulster Hall rally in which she described her Catholic faith as a "religion of fear and dread". Eventually she returned to Belfast and, following court proceedings, went back to her family on the understanding that she would be free to practise her chosen religion. She later returned to Catholicism, married a Catholic and raised her three children as Catholics.

Malachi recalled having a religious tendency himself at fifteen and discovering that "you can be too religious." You could become a "wee Holy Joe", he said, and be unpopular because of it. He contrasted that with the normal teenage business of going to dances, meeting people and getting out and about. That wasn't quite the Catholic Belfast I knew.

Admittedly, my experience came roughly twenty years later. I grew up in Ardoyne in the 1970s and 80s, so I wouldn't use my memories to contradict what Malachi remembers from an earlier generation. But listening to him made me think about just how peculiar the label "Holy Joe" becomes when applied to actual teenage lives.

On paper, I probably qualified. I became an altar boy at about seven and remained one until I was twenty-one. This wasn't some little operation involving two boys appearing on a Sunday morning. At one stage I remember perhaps thirty or forty altar boys. We were divided into sections around St Gemma's, St Paul's and St Pat's, roughly ten to a group, with a structure among the older altar boys and positions of responsibility. The top altar boy, the president, would generally be around eighteen. Being an altar boy was a big thing in Ardoyne.

It could also be surprisingly profitable. At weddings the best man would normally give the altar boys something. By the 1980s I remember £20 each being fairly normal. At funerals somebody might slip you a fiver in the 1970s and later a tenner. Get a few weddings and a couple of funerals in a good month and I could come away with £60 or £80. Not bad wages for a Holy Joe.

Yet I don't remember being an altar boy as separating me from ordinary teenage life. I was also a Boy Scout. At sixteen or seventeen I was going to a rockabilly club. Rockabilly wasn't a passing teenage costume either. I'm 58 now and I'm still in the jeans and boots. My teenage behaviour wasn't particularly saintly.

I smoked my first joint at fourteen before going to a Scout meeting. At sixteen I got drunk at a Scout camp and threw up in front of one of the leaders. At seventeen I got drunk at a party, fell asleep and some bastards shaved half my quiff off. I eventually rolled home with half a quiff. My emerging sex life wasn't exactly being conducted according to the catechism either. And I was still an altar boy.

Maybe people did think I was a Holy Joe. I honestly don't know. What I do know is that I never experienced being an altar boy as requiring me to inhabit some separate religious world from other teenagers.

Another part of Malachi's interview struck me. Recalling the Catholic culture he knew, he spoke about the priest being saluted when you passed him in the street and described the laity as living under the authority of the priesthood and hierarchy. Again, that wasn't my experience of Ardoyne.

I knew priests from the age of seven until I left the altar at twenty-one. I never saluted one. Nor did I regard a priest as possessing some extraordinary personal authority over me. To my young mind a priest had authority in much the same way a schoolteacher had authority. There were circumstances in which you did what you were told, but I didn't walk around regarding either as a superior species.

None of this means Malachi's memories are wrong. They are his memories. Mine are mine. There is also a generation between the Catholic Belfast he describes and much of the Ardoyne I remember. The Church itself changed enormously over those years.

Malachi talks about the Catholicism of Maura Lyons's time as a religion in which hell was real, leaving the Church placed you in serious moral danger, confession was routine and clerical authority permeated Catholic life. I don't doubt that world existed. A photograph of me serving Mass would have told you something true about me. I was an altar boy. A photograph of me in the Scouts would also have been true. So would one of me dressed rockabilly and heading for a club. But none of those photographs on its own would have told you who I was.

Perhaps that's what bothered me about the "wee Holy Joe" description. Religious involvement, religious belief and obedience to religious morality are three different things. They can overlap, but they don't have to. I could serve Mass, collect my wedding money, go to Scouts, listen to rock 'n' roll, chase girls, drink, break rules and turn up again at the altar. I was a teenager.

Had I been sixteen in 1956 rather than the 1970s, perhaps the Church around me would have exercised considerably more power. But 1956 was also the year rock 'n' roll and rockabilly were exploding into youth culture. Knowing myself, I suspect the result might not have been entirely different. I probably would have been an original Ardoyne Holy Joe with a quiff.

The Church could tell you where I was on Sunday morning. It couldn't necessarily tell you where I'd been on Saturday night.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

Confessions Of An Ardoyne Holy Joe

Christopher Owens 🏴“You wanna hear something really heavy? You Wanna Hear Something That’s Gonna Kick Your Balls Off?”

So said Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, bassist vocalist for Venom when on stage at Trenton Gardens, New Jersey in 1986. Although funny in isolation, the attitude sums up Venom: defiantly loud for the crowd and oozing self-confidence.

Something that Cronos had in abundance.


Born in London but moving to Newcastle Upon Tyne at a young age, Lant made a name for himself working at Impulse Studios in the city as a tape operator/assistant engineer. He later recalled that having to work with so many small-time bands who merely wanted to be clones of what was already going on at the time fuelled his rage and desire to make Venom stand out.

And stand out they did.

By fusing punk rock (with an awareness of the nascent UK82 acts like Discharge and The Exploited), heavy metal and the theatrics of Alice Cooper and David Bowie, they created something that was faster, uglier and much more evil sounding than the likes of Iron Maiden.

Lant told the Guardian that he:

. . . had that snot and piss and shit element, which I wanted to put back into metal. I saw more and more bands shoving socks down their pants and putting lipstick on, and I just was disgusted by that, to tell you the truth. Fucking hell, if heavy metal was anything it had to be raw and dangerous and in your face.

In terms of the theatrics, he once wrote that himself, guitarist Mantras and drummer Abaddon:

. . . had decided on using stage names very early on. I thought it would be lame to be singing about Satan and Demons and all the dark forces, and to have basic normal names. I felt it wasn't right, we needed names to fit the personalities, something more formidable and demonic. That was always my problem with Ozzy. He’d sing about dark figures then spoilt it all by going, 'Oh God, help me!’ Duh, Wrong! That was stopping one step short of where I wanted to take this band. We were prepared to go beyond the Hammer Horror of Black Sabbath.

 


I discovered Venom in 2006. Like many a thing that has influenced me in my lifetime, it was thanks to Killing Joke.

A review of their (then) recent album Hosannas... compared it to Venom (which was a bit off) so it made me track down Welcome to Hell and Black Metal. Two astonishing records that blurred the lines between Iron Maiden and Discharge. Pretty much ground zero for thrash metal, death metal and black metal. Later records were more miss than hit, but this year's 'Into Oblivion' is actually a great record so at least they went out on a high.

Because of that drive and determination to do something different, he was a divisive figure.

Cro-Mags guitarist Parris Mayhew recalled that:

Cronos was a jerk to Cro-Mags when we played with Venom. Our bass failed and we were on stage standing in front of a hostile Chicago metal audience with a bass that didn’t work with an audience chanting “fuck you go home!”. We asked to use his bass and he said, “$200.” And put out his open palm. Dick.

In his book Get in the Van, Henry Rollins wrote that:

Venom took almost an hour to get onstage. They had roadies tuning their guitars and shit. Finally, they hit stage. They were hilarious. It was like seeing Spinal Tap. The drummer had a guy that held an electric fan next to him and kept him high and dry. The singer/bass player was named Kronos [sic]. He had some great raps. He got the crowd to chant what I thought was 'Black Funky Metal' over and over, which I thought was pretty cool and then I thought that maybe I was wrong about these guys. I found out later that it was 'Black Fucking Metal.' Oh, excuse me. I expected them to go into [the Spinal Tap song] 'Sex Farm' at any second.

Regardless, they changed music for the better with their first two records and praise will always be forthcoming from me.


⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Conrad “Cronos” Lant

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Ten

 

A Morning Thought @ 3281

Paudie Sullivan ✍The stand-off on Garvaghy Road—where thousands gathered to prevent an Orange Order parade from forcing its way through the community—was not a staged political demonstration. 


It was a collision between a community refusing to yield and a political establishment caught totally off guard.

The Orange Order’s historical presence on the Garvaghy Road was never a neutral exercise in civil liberty. It was a coat-trailing exercise from its inception. The march was deemed "traditional" only because it established a route designed to project power into a Nationalist enclave. A parallel route of similar distance and timing exists nearby through a Unionist area where the parade would be warmly welcomed. The persistence on this route—historically marching outward through Obins Street to Drumcree Church before forcing its return journey down Garvaghy Road—was built on the explicit logic of an orange state that treated Irish Catholics in Portadown not as neighbours, but as a population to be contained.

Garvaghy was not merely a housing estate; through decades of systemic discrimination, disenfranchisement, and violence, it was a sanctuary. It was where a marginalized community could live, rest, and exist away from the daily structural violence of a state designed against them. To demand that this community absorb an unwanted procession—historically accompanied by Loyalist bands and at times masked paramilitaries, and set against a backdrop of local Catholics murdered during periods of heightened parade tension—was to demand that they accept the visual and physical language of their own subjugation.

This isn't an old grievance being dragged out for an annual airing. The Northern State was constructed by the British state as a sectarian entity. Its schools, housing, social relationships, party politics, and physical infrastructure were engineered to keep two national identities in permanent, unequal opposition. The Orange Order was mobilized at key historical junctures precisely to preserve that arrangement—whether fuelling the dockside pogroms during Partition or breaking the working-class solidarity that briefly unified Protestant and Catholic workers during the Outdoor Relief strikes of the 1930s. Whenever material conditions threatened the ruling unionist establishment, the sectarian valve was opened to realign class interest along tribal lines.

The Good Friday Agreement was supposed to have drawn a line under that structural dominance. For twenty-eight years, the prohibition on the Garvaghy Road parade functioned as a practical recognition of that reality: that the triumphalism of the orange state could no longer be forced upon a community that had borne the brunt of its violence. In Derry, where a unionist majority was absent, the parade issue eventually settled into a manageable reality, with the vast majority of annual marches passing without conflict. But Portadown was the citadel.

When the Parades Commission abruptly overturned nearly three decades of precedent, it struck at the foundational premise of the post-1998 settlement which ironically had managed sectarianism for almost three decades.

Sinn Féin’s leadership was blindsided. Operating in executive mode, managing Stormont's optics, and preparing to navigate an upcoming Assembly election in May, the party leadership was accustomed to managing and triangulating such crises. But the working-class residents on Garvaghy Road left zero room for political manoeuvring.

Outside the court, Breandán Mac Cionnaith anchored the community's resistance directly in the dead left behind by decades of loyalist violence:

21 people, 21 deaths, 21 families... every one of those murders impacted deeply on our community. For somehow or other we felt that we were to blame for standing up for our rights that those people had to die... we are going in there on behalf of those 21 families who lost their lives at the hands of loyalists.

Addressing the wider mobilization, he cut through any idea that this was an isolated local dispute or a bargaining chip to be managed: "Ireland's behind us. Ireland's standing for justice here." To the PSNI on the asphalt, his message was stark: there would be "no negotiation" over forcing the march back down the road.

That unshakable stance turned the road into an existential red line for Sinn Féin. The party leadership—including First Minister Michelle O’Neill—did not stand on that asphalt to lead a movement; they were dragged there by the sheer weight of community anger. To have stayed away, or to have offered the usual muted calls for calm and dialogue while an Orange parade marched down Garvaghy Road, would have meant political annihilation in the very working-class nationalist communities that form their bedrock. They had to stand on the road because the residents made it impossible for them to be anywhere else.

For the DUP, the flare-up provided a convenient distraction, diverting public scrutiny in a week where former leader Jeffrey Donaldson faced pre-sentencing for serious historical sexual offenses. But the spectacle also exposed the party's hollowed-out authority. Standing alongside Jamie Bryson—an unelected loyalist campaigner acting in a self-styled legal capacity outside the courts and at Drumcree—senior figures like MP Carla Lockhart and Upper Bann MLA Jonathan Buckley allowed an external activist to set the pace and command the microphone. Alliance Leader and Stormont’s Justice Minister Naomi Long captured the absurdity of the arrangement, calling on DUP leader Gavin Robinson to "focus on doing his job, rather than abdicating responsibility for leadership of unionism to Jamie Bryson."

It poses an inescapable question for mainstream unionism: has the party of government effectively abdicated its political strategy to the street? In attempting to cover its right flank, the DUP leadership visually confirmed that they no longer direct the movement—they simply follow behind the microphone held by unelected loyalist agitation.

The PSNI issued its legal warnings, and unionist politicians cited statutory duties and the rule of law. But the law can only regulate a confrontation; it cannot explain it, and the law in the North of Ireland belongs to an inherently sectarian state apparatus.

The argument on Garvaghy Road was never genuinely about a stretch of tarmac, nor was it a procedural dispute over public order. It was the physical manifestation of an unresolved contradiction at the heart of the GFA: an attempt to reassert historical dominance inside a settlement that was supposed to end it, met by a community that refused to let their political leaders compromise away their sanctuary.

It was not the past returning—it was the working-class base exposing the limits of political management, and proving that when the foundational mechanics of the state reassert themselves, the ground is held by the people standing on it, not the politicians trying to direct them.

⏩Paudie Sullivan is a socialist activist.

Drumcree Crisis 🪶 Walking Back The Clock

Simon Smyth ✍ I was at the paperback launch of Omar El Akkad's book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. 

The author was interviewed by the award-winning novelist Michael Magee. A portion of the proceeds were given to the worthwhile cause, MAP (Medical Aid for Palestine).

Apologies for anything factually incorrect below. I am going by my memory of tonight's event and not a recording or notes so I'm perhaps not telling it right at all. I also haven't read the book yet. This piece is heavy on paraphrasing and my own thoughts thrown in. So be warned.

There were so many profound, thought-provoking ideas from the author I was getting lost. It was a little like listening to a complicated radio show in another language, not knowing a word, thinking about it briefly, working the word out and then finding you've lost the track of the conversation.

He gave an interesting back story on his work as an journalist. He reported on Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay military trials, the Egyptian Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson.

He used to be a tech correspondent as well and he said the only thing that mattered was Amazon Corporation's quarterly profits and that they must be higher than the same quarter the year before. Which is another story but interwoven in the anti-social fabric of today's neoliberal world where the middle ground is the problem.

He made a convincing argument for replacing the current geo-political system, arguing that it is destroying the planet. It's a world where billionaires are accommodated but nobody else. The system of international law has broken down and it has directly led to a genocide where no-one intervenes.

A Palestinian lady from Gaza asked the first question. She spoke for a few moments and explained how, when her father told her (when she was safe in a Western country) that she was the last of their bloodline, she didn't feel sad but a kind of warm feeling knowing the importance and purpose of that. It was immediately shocking because I knew that this was not only the truth and a natural feeling it was something I would never have considered because of my comfortable life here.

The author spoke a lot about the middle ground and of turning a blind eye, and how it is in many ways worse than the vocally pro-genocide person. The people looking the other way are dishonest, like a smiling assassin I suppose. He gave the example of Ed Sheeran, and it confirmed the criticism he got from others. The 'nothing to do with me' attitude.

He said the honesty of Trump, not mentioning human rights on his state visits to Saudi Arabia, compared to Biden's insincere forked tongue when he gave short speeches on the subject, was in many ways better as you knew what you were dealing with.

He was asked about armed resistance and he said that he was a pacifist but not a committed one, as his tax dollars pay for the genocide yet he still pays his taxes to avoid going to jail. He said he can't tell people who are suffering how to resist and he said if half his extended family were wiped out he really doesn't know how he'd react. Some people, he said ,internalise and others fight back.

He was also asked if he had hope, and he said he often gets asked that. He went on to explain that if the people getting slaughtered in the ongoing genocide still have hope, who the fuck is he to say he doesn't have any?

He talked about the invisible people, the people from South and South-East Asia who work in places like Qatar. who are brought over to work in a system a little above people smuggling. The disenfranchised. They are promised more money than they make at home and when they arrived find it is less than promised - those who died every day when the stadiums were being built for the World Cup.

He gave an analogy of a house where there are termites gnawing away in the basement and the majority are at ground level with the billionaires in the master bedroom. If you look out the window and see other people building a different house, but they don't have strong carpentry skills but there's no termites in the basement what would you do?

⏩ Simon Smyth is an avid reader and collector of books.

Termites In The Basement

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