At about 6.30am last Sunday, the political process seemed to be only minutes away from receiving its Last Rites.

Had the PSNI decided to physically remove protesters from the Garvaghy Road, Stormont would not have survived the weekend and the hope of a Blue Lights future for the PSNI would have been extinguished, with far-lasting consequences.

A couple of months ago, I sat with a handful of fellow school leaders from west Belfast in a room with Jon Boutcher, the Chief Constable.

As he spoke about his hopes to develop a more representative police service, he appeared taken aback when some of my colleagues made clear to him both their own negative experiences of policing down the years, and the depth of hostility that lingered for the police within our community to this day, due to the legacy of an RUC that actively existed and operated in opposition to the nationalist community.

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The road to a representative policing service has not been and will not be easy, but it would have been impossible had the utterly disgraceful and incomprehensible decision of the Parades Commission to approve a supremacist, sectarian loyalist parade on Garvaghy Road been enforced by the PSNI.

We are not out of the woods yet, but it at least appears that the apparent determination of some within political unionism and loyalism to manufacture this crisis........

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