The law was settled, the street stayed calm, the Orange didn’t march and yet for all of that nationalism still comes out behind.
The recent events on the Garvaghy Road will be remembered by some as a victory. For a small group of dissident republican activists, they were. For mainstream nationalism, the picture is far less flattering. The Orange Order’s legal right to walk the road was reaffirmed, yet the political fallout has hardened tribal lines at precisely the moment nationalism needs to soften them. If the goal is a border poll, Garvaghy Road was a step backwards.
From the unionist and Orange perspective, the legal question is closed. The right to walk the road was tested in court and upheld. But there is also a quiet acknowledgement within those circles that a legal right cannot be exercised with impunity if doing so triggers serious civil disorder. Rights on paper and rights on tarmac are not the same thing, and few in the Order pretend otherwise.
What did not happen matters just as much. Many feared that loyalism would “activate” and that the summer would slide into confrontation. It didn’t. Unionism and loyalism stayed on the right side of the law through deliberate self-restraint. That restraint deserves more credit than it has received, and it sharpened the contrast with what followed on the nationalist side.
The central figure on the road was Breandán Mac Cionnaith, no longer a member of Sinn Féin and now firmly in the camp opposed to the Good Friday Agreement. His influence over a local dispute is unsurprising. What is surprising is how readily mainstream nationalism followed his lead.
Nationalist leaders from both North and South effectively paid fealty to his cause. In doing so, they allowed dissident voices to muddy the waters and dictate the terms of the debate. Parties that have spent a generation insisting on their democratic, constitutional credentials ended up lending legitimacy to a campaign led by someone who rejects the very settlement they claim to champion. That is a tactical gift to the dissidents and a strategic own goal for everyone else.
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. For three decades, the Catholic population has grown relative to the Protestant population. Yet the nationalist vote remains stuck at roughly 40%. Demography was supposed to be destiny. It hasn’t been.
The reason lies in the middle ground: the 17–18% of the population who are uncommitted on the constitutional question. These are the voters nationalism must win to reach the 50% threshold that would make a border poll realistic. And they are exactly the voters most repelled by the politicisation of parading. As Máiría Cahill has pointed out, sectarian chanting and street-level tribalism do nothing to reassure people who are weighing up their future rather than their identity.
Worse, there appears to be an outflow. Some former nationalist voters are tired of culture wars and wagon-circling. They want healthcare, housing and functioning government, not another summer of standoffs. Every Garvaghy Road pushes a few more of them toward the “other” box, or out of the electorate altogether. Nationalism is building a laager when it needs to be building a coalition.
None of this means the Orange Order is fashionable. Among liberal Protestants it is very much not the flavour of the day. That should be an opening for nationalism. A confident, inclusive movement could present itself as the modern, pluralist alternative.
Instead, the response to parading undercuts that pitch. It lands awkwardly after genuinely pluralist moments such as the Belfast Mela, which showed a Northern Ireland comfortable with difference. When nationalism reacts to a parade with the same old reflexes, it dents its claim to be an open project.
The liberal Protestant who dislikes the Orange Order may dislike the over the top reaction to it even more. Mairia in her column today in the Irish News notes just how extreme some of the triumphalism that inevitably accompanied the great nationalist Jamboree on the road:
One man could be seen playing hurling in the middle of the night. In the backdrop was scrawled graffiti on a wall saying “f*** your sash, tiocfaidh ár lá”. A GAA banner later covered this sectarian sentiment.
Rebel singers will not have helped any future relationship-building by belting out “My Old Man’s a Provo” from the back of a lorry on Garvaghy (surely the residents had suffered enough?).
Nor will residents have been helped by singing “By a lonely Drumcree hill, 10,000 Orangemen freezing… with their sashes and their flutes, bowler hats and Sunday suits, oh they’ll not be marching down Garvaghy Road” on the night the parade was banned.
Nor helped by the sight of former IRA men roaring down megaphones, directing protesters on where to stand, or separately, images of Kneecap (not everyone’s cup of tea, according to some) with their tricolour balaclava, posing with children.
Last night’s vote of confidence at Stormont only reinforced the theatre. Without cross-community support, such motions are functionally meaningless in the Assembly. It was a showpiece, which unionist politicians performed for the loyalist base. It changed nothing except the temperature.
Several questions still deserve more attention. The legal clarifications around the protest may have consequences for the activists involved; their future liability, and the status of similar protests, could look very different now. There is also the question of scale.
It seems unlikely that the level of controversy that Garvaghy Road has achieved will be replicated elsewhere, but the homage paid to dissident activists may embolden residents’ groups in other areas who have watched what attention can achieve.
Most important from a political point of view is the demographic paradox. Why has a sustained population shift over the last 30 years not produced a proportional rise in the nationalist vote? Culture-war fatigue is part of the answer, but only part.
For now, the lesson of Garvaghy Road is simple. Winning the street is not the same as winning the constitutional argument, and nationalism cannot reach 50% by talking only to the 40% it already has. The only way to make those arguments is not through the performance of greiveance, but by making small moves that shift the future from probable to preferable outcomes.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
Discover more from Slugger O'Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
