Justice and Policing, Orange Parades and Human Rights

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Friday January 29, 2010 14:34 by Peter Mulholland - none orangecitadel at gmail dot com

A Struggle for Recognition

This article argues that the DUP's attempt to link policing and justice to Orange parades is a threat to human rights in Northern Ireland.

The Orange Order and its associated institutions seem to believe that they have a right to parade through Nationalist areas of Northern Ireland and the DUP appear to be trying to support that right by refusing to honour their commitments to policing and justice, and, thereby threatening the Peace Process.

In essence, there is nothing new in this. As I have documented elsewhere, Orange parades have disturbed the peace and corrupted policing and justice in Ireland for a couple of hundred years (see: http://orangecitadel.blogspot.com/). Since the inception of the Orange Order in 1795 its paramilitary rituals have been imposed with violence and the threat of violence or further socioeconomic exclusion. Since the inception of the Northern State until July 1998 those sectarian rituals were endorsed by the state, backed up by the judiciary, facilitated by the security forces, and approved or condoned by many within the Church of Ireland and other Protestant churches.

Nevertheless, the Orangemen complain that they are now being denied their right as citizens (or ‘subjects’) to parade ‘the Queen’s highway’. The fact of the matter is that Orange parades are a symbolic expression of sectarian domination and they have corrupted policing and justice in Ireland for many generations. And, as I argued in 1999, they are a denial of the basic human rights of the minority community in Northern Ireland – the right to live in peace and security, with dignity, respect, and justice (see Mulholland, P. 1999. Drumcree; a Struggle for Recognition 1999, Irish Journal of Sociology Vol. 9)

The Orange Order’s official response to the so-called ‘Drumcree Siege’ of 1995 is a good example of how it persists in misrepresenting and covering up its tradition of violence and sectarian abuse. In 1995 the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland published a booklet called The Order on Parade. In the introduction Brian Kennaway held that the ongoing debate about Orange Parades was ill informed and opined that ‘If people were better informed as to the nature of the Orange Institution they would be in a much better position to understand the purpose of parades’. Mr. Kennaway then proceeded to quote from the Bible in support of a fatuous suggestion that the victims of Orange aggression should not ‘go out of their way to be offended’ by Orangemen who, he noted: ‘should not give offence to anyone’. Then, without offering any insight into the 'nature of the Orange Institution', the authors of this ‘educational’ book proceeded to defend their demonstrations of sectarian supremacy in a manner that suggested parading was the Order’s raison d’être. Without the slightest indication of any sense of irony, they defended all and every Orange Parade as being part of a colourful tradition that fulfils a common need to celebrate political and religious commitments and beliefs. They described Orange parading as being ‘a celebration’, ‘a display of pageantry’, ‘a demonstration of strength’ that provides ‘a sense of tradition’, ‘a testimony and a statement of beliefs’, and ‘the culmination of each lodge's activities’ (and see The Orange Citadel, 1996)

This kind of Orange propaganda led many to view the Drumcree ‘Church parade’ as being the epitome of a conflict over two equal but opposing sets of rights or, worse still, as a modern manifestation of a sectarian ‘tribal’ conflict. In fact, the Drumcree parade is where Orangeism has historically woven religion into politics in the creation and maintenance of a sectarian state in which ‘Protestant’ domination over the Catholic/Nationalist community was assured. Historical events and circumstances have established Drumcree (Obins Street and now the Garvaghy Road) as the premier site of ritualized threats of violence and sectarian domination.

Drumcree is the dark heart of Orangeism. But it is also the site of a struggle to change people’s perceptions of the Northern conflict. In that highly symbolic space ‘the two communities’ in Northern Ireland are struggling to retain or to change the structure of Northern Irish society through winning recognition for their competing worldviews. Drumcree is where the two ethno-political groups in Northern Ireland have engaged in a struggle to win the symbolic capital necessary to obtain effective symbolic power. But more than that, it is where successive generations of the long-suppressed and much abused Catholic community have fought a battle for human rights.

The Garvaghy road campaign and all the other contemporaneous and historic campaigns against Orange parades were essentially about changing the nature of relations between the two communities in order that the civil and human rights of the minority community might be fully recognized and juridically guaranteed. In the 1980s and through the 1990s it became a struggle to expose, so as to break out of a sectarian environment that perpetuated the socioeconomic and cultural subordination of Catholics while also undermining their sense of self, their self-respect, their dignity, and their sense of belonging and identity. That sectarian environment was experienced as being annually reinvigorated through Orange parading rituals that reasserted the moral and social supremacy of a dominant group that represented itself as being ‘the Protestant community’.

The German philosopher Axel Honneth has suggested that social conflicts be interpreted as struggles to create the conditions necessary for self-realization through establishing relations of mutual recognition. He observed that when people are denied recognition they feel compelled to achieve what is sensed as being a ‘vital’ human need. As Honneth explained in The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, it is through experiencing the negative emotional reactions of shame, indignation, and rage that we come to realize that we are being denied social recognition, a vital human need. That vital need is a deeply felt, very personal need for recognition of the dignity and worth of the individual and the struggle to achieve it kicks in when the ethnicity, status, dignity, physical integrity or sense of security of any group is systematically disrespected and denied. Readers can get some sense of how the Orange Order has systematic abused Northern Nationalists and denied recognition of their vital human need for recognition and respect from the aforementioned bolg. As that blog shows, opposition to Orange parades in Portadown and elsewhere in the North was not part of a sinister republican or Sinn Féin strategy, as the Orange Order, the RUC, and some elements of news media often used to claim (and as one respondent to my previous posting on Indymedia seems also to think ). Opposition to Orange parades in the North is a couple of hundred years old and it was driven by first-hand experience of socioeconomic, political, physical, and emotional abuse. And it was because others shared in those experiences that the anti-parades protest in my home town of Portadown won such widespread support amongst the minority community all across the North, including the support of some non-Catholics and even amongst some with Unionist or Royalist sentiments.

Even if they can, the DUP must not be allowed to link policing and justice to a threat, or to the possible denial of the basic human rights of the minority community in Northern Ireland.

Bibliography
Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle For Recognition. Polity Press.
Mulholland, P. (2010) Orange Parades Undermine Justice and Policing: Two Centuries of Corruption. http://www.indymedia.ie/article/95599?include_comments=...=true
Mulholland, P. 1999. Drumcree; a Struggle for Recognition 1999, Irish Journal of Sociology Vol. 9.
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=2&sid=b...79545
Portadown Cultural Heritage Committee, LOL District No.1 (1996) The Orange Citadel.
The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland Education Committee (1995) The Order On Parade.