Harold Gracey and King Lear
BY FERN LANE
Harold Gracey has a point. Try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment. You are fast approaching your dotage, having grown up in a place where for so long the order of things seemed as though it were God-given and where for many years it remained virtually unchallenged. In the good old days of one-party rule, people knew their place; or if they didn't they were taught - as they had to be - often violently, but also in more abstruse ways via education, housing, employment, and through the social and political institutions.
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Having ensured the division of the land, in human and geographical terms, Gracey and the Orange Order now rage ever more impotently against their inability to continue exerting the absolute power they once had
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Somewhere near the very top of that order was the Order. Membership of it was essential for social advancement and it also afforded many additional privileges to an already highly privileged elite. Perhaps the greatest of these was the acquisition of a police force, whose sole function was to maintain this natural order; Unionist/Protestant/Orangeman at the top (where they belonged); Nationalist/Catholic at the bottom (where they belonged).
Thus Gracey's utter incomprehension that the RUC does not just do as it is told by the Order and obediently batter the opposition off the road so that they and their cohorts can express their cultural superiority, is in some way almost understandable. After all, it always did in the past. That it has not done so in very recent times must seem like a violation of everything Harold thought he knew. The RUC has always offered the best hope for guaranteeing British, Unionist and Orange supremacy, yet here it is denying the local Grand Wizard his Ôright' to put Taigs in their place.
Given all of that, Gracey's plea to the RUC officers who were preventing him marching down the Garvaghy Road last Saturday - paradoxically to mark the 1,000th day of Portadown Orangemen's failure to march down the Garvaghy Road - to ``search your conscience, search your conscience'' is an almost reasonable one. Preventing Orangemen from trampling over others is a new and probably very uncomfortable feel for the vast majority of RUC officers.
``We know where you come from'' he pleaded with them. ``You come from the Protestant community, the vast majority of you come from the Protestant community and it is high time that you supported your own Protestant people.''
Well, quite. But Harold should not despair too much for his police force. The RUC is not reformed. Most of its members will continue to be from the Protestant community, and many of them will still be members of the loyal orders. But in contrast to the Orange Order, the upper ranks of the RUC are developing a more shrewd eye for the tactics required for survival. Of course it remains the armed wing of Unionism and it is a sure bet that many of Gracey's brethren facing him on Saturday did indeed suffer pangs of conscience; after all, the reason the British army has to be called in to police Drumcree is because in previous years the RUC could not be trusted to do so (the British army, on the other hand, will shoot whoever they are told to shoot).
In large, public situations such as Portadown the RUC can make some kind of a show of Ôevenhandedness'. For the sake of their well-paid careers, its senior officers cannot be seen by the world to tolerate the naked bigotry of the Orange Order, even if they are privately of the same view. But away from the gaze of the media, in its daily, unpublicised, contact with the Catholic community, and in its own secretive little world, nothing much has changed within the RUC. The flood of complaints to the Policing Ombudsman bears testimony to that. The sectarianism, brutality and incompetence continues; this is still Unionism's police force.
But, remarkably, responding to Gracey's grandstanding last Saturday, the Irish News said in its editorial on Monday - without a hint of irony - that ``No police service in a civilised country will base its operational decisions on religious considerations. If such a service does so it will effectively isolate itself from a large section of the population''. Well, the RUC did and it has. A bit of Gracey-baiting does not change that.
Back in Portadown, the Orange Order and its embodiment in the person of Harold Gracey, is fast turning into a cheap and nasty King Lear. Having ensured the division of the land, in human and geographical terms, it now rages ever more impotently against its inability to continue exerting the absolute power it once had. What it and Harold Gracey lacks is Lear's pathos - who outside Unionism can feel sorry for such an irredeemably racist and religious supremacist and his increasingly pathetic attempts to garner publicity for his hopeless cause? Because unlike Lear, the Orange Order has sinned infinitely more than it has been sinned against.
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