You can’t have a proper grasp of the Drumcree standoff until you have read the masterly account of the background in the book by eminent journalist and social historian, Susan McKay, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People. Without it, you are seeing the issue as through a glass darkly to borrow a biblical phrase.

Her chapter on Portadown is a vivid portrayal of the deeply ingrained sectarian attitudes, prejudices and fears which lie beneath the Orange obsession with marching along a particular route from Drumcree parish church to the centre of Portadown, after an annual church service to commemorate the battle of the Somme. Inability to march the Garvaghy road assumed existential significance in Orange minds for Protestant liberties and the future of the union itself.

That is why Portadown’s Orange Lodge applied unsuccessfully every year for the last 28 years for a Parades Commission permit. Political amnesia in the Republic has dulled memory of the utter savagery, appalling violence and the medieval fortifications used to enforce the ban on the annual Garvaghy road march.

Rejection by the commission of applications to renew the march had become so routine that the commission itself this year unlawfully gave up proper consideration of those applications. The illegality of their paper rejections was exposed in High Court proceedings on August........

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