Three little boys were sleeping in their beds just after four o’clock in the morning when a car slowed down in front of their home and the petrol bomb thrown from it burned them to death. It was July Twelfth, the apex of triumphalism in the loyalist calendar and, in Drumcree, the Orange Order was demanding a “right to walk the queen’s highway” in triumphalist parade on the Garvaghy Road.

When photographs of the Quinn boys were published, the world abruptly stopped spinning. Richard (11), Mark (10) and Jason (8) glowed with guiltlessness. The UVF killed them simply because they were Catholics, regardless that their school and their mother’s partner were Protestant.

Four years of Drumcree protests had already sparked numerous sectarian killings. A taxi driver shot dead in his car. A 12-year-old boy killed while running from a chasing pack. The PSNI’s predecessor, the RUC, recorded 144 houses damaged, 178 vehicles hijacked, 284 arrests, 76 police officers injured, 632 petrol bombs and 837 plastic rounds fired by the RUC in a period of four years from 1995 to 1998 inclusive. But it was the image of the Quinn children that captured the lethal lunacy of Orangemen insisting on showboating an ancient battle victory over ancestors of Portadown’s minority, the nationalists living on the Garvaghy Road.

Even after the three white coffins went into the ground, the Orange Order persisted with its attempts to parade on the road, but their numbers dwindled and a facade of peace descended when the Parades Commission refused them permission year after year. Until now.

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