Loyalist supremacy complex
by Padraig MacDabhaid
Loyalists are attempting to up the ante in the run up to Drumcree by
planning a ``long walk'' throughout the Six Counties.
The organisers are planning the march to leave Derry on Thursday 24 June
and after making its way through Limavady, Coleraine, Ballymoney,
Ballymena, Antrim, Lisburn and Lurgan arrive in Portadown in time for the
participants to take part in Drumcree march on 4 July.
nouncing plans for the long march at a press conference on Wednesday, 16
June, organisers' spokesperson Jonathan Bell said: ``No one should be
offended if the march passes through nationalist areas''.
He added that the march intended to draw intention to the ``forgotten
victims of republican violence''.
That DUP Assembly member Paul Berry who recently, ``threatened'' that
Orangemen would walk the Garvaghy Road no matter what is a clear message
that this march has more to do with unionist supremacy than civil rights.
The proposed route for the march, which will also link up with feeder
parades, highlights the insensitivity of the organisers.
Their proposed route will take them through Greysteel, the site of the 1993
Rising Sun bar massacre in which the UDA killed seven people and wounded
13.
The marchers will then go through Coleraine and Limavady in order to reach
Ballymoney, the site of last year's murder by loyalists of the three Quinn
children. Feeder marches are also intended to pass through the mainly
nationalist villages of Bellaghy and Dunloy.
The march will then move through Antrim, a town in which nationalists and
Catholics have suffered from increasing loyalist violence in the last year.
Then on to Crumlin, where loyalists murdered Ciaran Heffron after a DUP
rally in Antrim and recently has seen pipe bomb attacks on nationalist
owned pubs.
The marchers also intend to pass through Lurgan, where loyalists killed
Rosemary Nelson.
``They are trying to intimidate nationalists and Catholics in vulnerable
areas and are trying to make nationalists, who have the right under the
Good Friday Agreement to live free from sectarian harassment, lie down
under loyalist triumphalism'', said Sinn Fein's Eoin O'Broin .
The `long walk committee', consisting of 80 members drawn from a variety of
Protestant, unionist and loyalist groupings, have issued an invitation ``to
all sections of the Protestant and unionist population of Northern Ireland
who through no fault of their own have become directly or indirectly the
innocent victims of the past 30 years of terrorism''. This comes despite a
plea from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to call off the
march.
DUP Assembly member Gregory Campbell has rubbished the Church's plea,
saying ``as I go about Northern Ireland, I find ordinary rank and file
Protestants who, be they nominal or active churchgoers, are saying that the
things that they hear from some of their pulpits does not represent what
they believe''.
The Parades Commission has started to canvass for public opinion on the
march and is expected to make a decision today, Thursday 17 June.
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