Republican News · Thursday 13 February 1997

The front line of bigotry

Phoblacht reports from Harryville

SOME REPORTS FROM HARRYVILLE last weekend suggested that the Orange band parade in the 22nd week of loyalist protest outside Ballymena's beleaguered Catholic Church of Our Lady passed off peacefully.

Up to a point. No parishioners were beaten leaving mass, no buses burned nor were any houses petrol bombed, as happened on Saturday 1 December when Orange mobs used the excuse of a banned march at Dunloy the previous Sunday to go on the rampage. In the following week dozens of Catholics were attacked and houses and chapels torched across the Six Counties.

Last Saturday was tense. The RUC and the shadowy organisers from the Harryville Residents Association agreed to delay the time of the parade and allow the massgoers to leave unhindered.

Our arrival at Harryville coincided with the first arrivals from the Orange mob. They stood across the road singing about being ``Billy Boys ... up to their knees in Fenian Blood'', then claimed their protest for civil rights threatened no-one.

``Print the truth,'' one said to a Dublin journalist beside me, ``no one is here to intimidate anyone''.

Then speaking to a massgoer entering the chapel I was told that Father Mullan, the parish priest, had just that week been warned ``not to come back'' while on sick visits to his parishioners in the Ballykeel estate.

The Orange sashes, the Glasgow Rangers scarves tied tightly around the faces and in some cases the dark glasses tell their own message of threat and intimidation and the true nature of this `cultural phenomenon' known as a band parade soon exposed itself - when the parade started, led by the Portadown Defenders it was a contest to see who could beat their drums and blow their whistles loudest outside the chapel.

The Protestant Boys from the Shankill in Belfast stopped and blasted out the Sash not twenty yards from the chapel; not regarded as a place of worship by these Orangemen and so on and on with the bands from Tandragee, Randalstown and Dunloy Accordion band who at least didn't play passing Our Lady's.

d all along the drunken louts with their beer and threats: ``youse are probably just Fenian Bastards'', they growled pushing photographers and shoving cameras in the faces of those who dared stand just outside the RUC line for a better shot.

It is clear then that what passes for peaceful in Ballymena is that the Catholics remain invisible and the Orange mobs will rule.

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