THE (restricted) Tour of the North parade gets under way in a few minutes. But if you don’t fancy getting wet, and still want to sample loyalist culture – in the safety of your own home no less – you could do worse than watch The Men Who Won’t Stop Marching. It’s one of the BBC’s Wonderland documentaries, and it’s absolutely fascinating to see the Shankill through the eyes of “Jordan, an eleven-year old aspiring drummer from one of the most famous former paramilitary families on the estate”.
More than ten years after the end of the troubles, filmmaker Alison Millar explores Belfast’s Shankill Road to find out how well the scars of war have healed.
What she found is a mixture of entrenched prejudice, relief that the troubles are over, nostalgia for the days of paramilitary discipline, and a battened-down resistance to talking about the past.
But when Jordan makes a shocking discovery at the end of his road, his father’s brittle silence cracks and he decides to take his son on a journey into his own past and through the Maze Prison where he had been inside for several years.
Well worth a watch before it goes offline on Wednesday.
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