Analysis
[from "Every day is doomsday", Michael Mac Donnacha, An Phoblacht, 11 July '96]:

"Given the political developments of the past two years there are probably many, including some in the Dublin government, who believe that it would never come to this. They may have thought that David Trimble would not be at Drumcree, seeing last year's appearance as electioneering for the Ulster Unionist Party leadership.

For nationalists on the front line in the Six Counties there were no such illusions. The lessons about the true nature of Orangeism have been learned through generations. The brinkmanship and the threatening rhetoric of unionist leaders has been followed by the sectarian killing of a Catholic taxi driver from Lurgan and the forcing out of families in Belfast, in a pattern that has been repeated many times before.

The fuse for this year's explosion was not lit by RUC chief Hugh Annesley's banning of the Drumcree parade [which he subsequently sanctioned]. It was lit exactly 12 months earlier when David Trimble and Ian Paisley marched hand in hand through cheering loyalist crowds in Portadown, proclaiming victory.

'There was no compromise' declared Trimble. That 'jig' and the striking of medals for participants in last year's 'Siege of Drumcree' are the symbolic equivalent of Orangemen throwing pennies from Derry's Walls into the nationalist Bogside. In Derry this year the Orange agenda showed through, with Orangemen seeking to march through Derry City centre, to revive a parade that hasn't been held since 1969.

The Orange Order depends for its very existence upon the inculcation in its followers of just such a sense of elitism. The real class, political and religious divisions within the unionist and Protestant communities can still be accommodated within the order.

What most commentators ignore is the consideration without which the Orange Order and the events of this week are inexplicable. It is not the mythical heritage of King Billy and the Boyne, nor the legacy of the Battle of the Diamond and the founding of the Order in 1795. It is the fact that for over 50 years the Orange Order effectively hold state power in the Six Counties. The combination of organized elitism and actual state power was lethal. It made unionism incredibly resistant to change. To this day no unionist leader will acknowledge that any sectarian injustices were perpetrated by unionist governments against nationalists during the Stormont years. Unionism has never recovered from the trauma of the loss of that Stormont parliament in 1972. Every move further away from the institutionalized sectarianism of the unionist one-party state - however small that move may be to nationalists - has been seen as the final sell-out by unionists.

But this political neurosis has not come about by accident. It has been fed by British governments and by unionist leaders. Successive Westminster governments have allowed unionists to block change completely or to dictate its pace. There intransigence has been rewarded. The months since 31 August 1994 [start of the IRA's cessation of military operations] have provided many example of that, a catalog of unionists intransigence and British stalling..."