Thanks to Unherd for asking me for my view on the consequences of the Secretary of State for NI banning the Drumcree march. An excerpt is below – the full article is on Unherd.
The ban, “was the only sensible decision after the region’s police chief, Jon Boutcher, had written to Bryant formally requesting a review of the Commission’s ruling. The alternative was to let the dispute fester through a long winter and set the context for regional elections looming in May.
[…]
“The decision lets both sides of Northern Ireland’s divided community claim victory. Nationalists — from anti-Good Friday Agreement dissident Republicans, through to Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) — were united against reviving the parade. Thousands, including Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald and Vice President Michelle O’Neill, descended on Portadown over recent weekends to support locals, who repeatedly showed they could block the road in numbers too great for the police to remove them without a degree of force nobody was prepared to countenance.
“Many Unionists, however, see a decidedly pyrrhic victory for Irish nationalism, undercutting its claims to accommodate Orange and British culture in any future “new Ireland”. They hope it will bolster wavering liberal Protestants — the sort deeply perturbed by Brexit, who have shown intermittent flashes of being tempted by a united Ireland in a future border poll — although this group is hardly known for supporting Orange parades. Unionism can walk away from this crisis seeing itself as the side that boxed clever and took the moral high ground. Rather than shouting “No surrender” and digging in for a long siege as it once would have, it leaves with important legal victories in its back pocket, having avoided unduly annoying the likely swing voters in any border poll: the region’s detribalised moderates and ethnic minorities.
“Nationalism’s victory comes at the cost of a real medium-term risk to the 1998 Public Processions Act which regulated parades.”