A Tangled Web

Terror and Irony



Sinn Fein/IRA underling, John O'Dowd, 'advises' the Parades Commission against capitulating to pro-Union demands to allow Orangemen to march down the Garvaghy Road this coming Sunday. When one considers such a request coming from a representative of a movement which has made every conceivable political gain by the threat and implementation of violence, it is surely laughable for any one of them to preach about potential threats emanating from elsewhere.



The Drumcree parade is certainly not: 'a sectarian, coat-trailing exercise through the Catholic community in Portadown.' This particular part of Portadown has had a Catholic majority since the mid-1970's, yet no offence was ever taken to the presence of Orangemen until Sinn Fein/IRA and their poisonous, myrmidon 'Residents Groups' arrived on the scene some twenty years later. Like a virulent disease gradually attacking new areas where once parades took place without any animosity, Sinn Fein are beginning to select new areas for contention. First it was the 'Tunnel' area of Portadown. Over ten years they have sought to infiltrate the Ormeau Road, Dunloy and parts of Londonderry.



Orange parades are reviled by the republican movement not because of any trappings of historical/religious dominance, but because of their cultural embodiment of UK sovereignty over Northern Ireland. And, as Irish nationalism has amply demonstrated in the past, UK sovereignty is only a means of extracting concessions to bolster terrorist demands, never something which merits even the most tenuous constitutional or cultural acknowledgement. If only the 'Young Turks' now in control of the DUP hierarchy could understand that point before they enter a Faustian pact to accelerate their own careers.