The Hillsborough “deal” on Drumcree is not a compromise. It is a surrender made to look as one, and the Orange Order has already told Chris Bryant where to put it.
What was on the table, as reported this morning by the Nolan Show and confirmed in outline by the Irish News and the Belfast Telegraph: the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition would accept that the Orange Order has a legal right to walk the road, and would publicly accept that it was wrong to block them. In return, Portadown District would agree not to walk it anyway.
Read that again.
You concede the right exists. You concede you were wrong to stop it. And the settlement is that the people who hold the right still do not exercise it.
That is not mediation. That is asking one side to win the argument and then pretend they lost, so the other side can keep the veto it has held since 1998 while looking reasonable for the media.
Residents’ spokesman Breandán Mac Cionnaith said they would sign if the Order did. Of course they would. The paper hands them the outcome they wanted and a press statement that they were the reasonable ones.
DUP MP Carla Lockhart, speaking at a loyalist rally in Portadown last night, called it what it is: no capitulation, and no deal that ends with Portadown “walking away” from a route the Parades Commission has already said they may take. Bryant left Hillsborough calling an agreement “tantalisingly close.” Close to what? A photo opportunity in which a lawful determination is traded for a polite apology and then binned.
The parade was scaled down to a silent walk, no bands, a few dozen men, an early start. The answer from the road was a blockade. The answer from Hillsborough was: admit they were entitled to pass, then ask them not to. If that is the gold standard of British statecraft on a 30-year dispute, the bar is on the floor.
A right you are praised for not using is not a right. It is a favour. Portadown have said they are not in the favour business.
No Surrender!
