Orange mask slips to reveal the fascist hate within

By Tom McGurk

On Wednesday night as Rosemary Nelson's husband and three young children were spending the last night in their home with their mother's shattered remains, the Portadown District Orange Order had a final message for them.

They went down to Corcrain Orange Hall, took out their Lambeg drums and began drumming. The sound of Lambegs can carry for miles and perhaps it even reached to the Nelson household where the family were waking the legless, mutilated torso of their mother. Even by the standards of Portadown Orangeism it was a moment of abysmal savagery. Later a group gathered on the pavement outside the Orange Hall and began to dance and chant celebrating Nelson's death: "Bomb, bomb the Fenian bitch" they roared.

In the face of such a display, one suddenly senses with a jolt that one is dealing with something way beyond the parameters of any political or even religious passion. The force at work here is a communal psychosis, a sort of moral torpor that pushes those afflicted beyond the parameters of humanity. And what is most shocking of all about this aberrant behaviour is that for a very large section of the unionist population in Portadown it was not regarded as exceptional. Were Rosemary Nelson a local IRA hit-man it might perhaps have been understandable, but this was the celebration of the murder of a solicitor who sought no more than to use the law of the land to defend the human rights of anyone who came knocking on her door.

The message in this too is instructive; it depicts a community of people who believe that their nationalist neighbours are not even entitled to protection under the law in certain circumstances. In this bedrock, Orangeism assumes the same face, and unleashes the same forces that swept millions of Jews to their deaths during World War II. The Nazis did no more than give political effect and communal approval to the unspoken agenda that they had whipped up in Germany's frightened and disturbed population after World War I, namely that the Jew was the common enemy because he was to blame for all of Germany's problems.

Four years down the road from the first Drumcree crisis, the nationalist ghetto of Garvaghy Road is beginning to assume the manifestations of the Jewish ghettoes the Nazis established as the first phase in solving the "Jewish problem." A nationalist is kicked to death on the main street of Portadown in sight of the RUC; a local Catholic taxi-driver is called out and shot dead; a local nationalist community leader and solicitor is blown up; and night after night, baiting, attacking and menacing the community on Garvaghy Road has become the entertainment of young loyalists.

Now nationalists cannot shop in the Main Street, their children are bussed under hails of stones to school, and Garvaghy has become a siege town within a town. In July the Orange Order is thinking of bringing their entire membership to Portadown to test the resolve of the government and to threaten any new devolved administration that may emerge out of Good Friday. Because Garvaghy Road is about the fundamental Orange belief that post-plantation nationalists have no indigenous territorial rights and that is what marching into nationalist areas is all about - this is where and why they have chosen to make their last stand. And, given that their own ancestors first established the Orange Order within miles of Garvaghy Road, it is a most appropriate place to choose.

It is a battle that every decent person in these islands must ensure that they do not win. Garvaghy Road, largely at the prompting of the Orange Order, has now become the line in the sand for every decent instinct that we possess. And cross it they must not.

Meanwhile the damage unionism has inflicted on itself in Portadown is becoming incalculable. The FBI have been brought in to the Nelson murder probe because they have a forensic ability unrivalled anywhere. As Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh discovered when the FBI could identify not only the fertiliser but the sack from the shop he bought it from, if there are security force connections to the bomb which killed Nelson, Chris Patton will be on a home-run in dealing with the RUC.

At long last Nelson's death may open up the long and secret road that runs from the Dublin/Monaghan bombings of 1974 up to this week. David Phillips of the Kent Constabulary who is also on the case might do well to ponder the words of former RUC Chief Constable John Hermon to John Stalker at the end of their first lunch. Hermon looked at Stalker, smiled and said, "Remember Mr Stalker, you are in a jungle now..."

They should now rename Garvaghy Road Rosemary Nelson Street, in order to ensure that this remarkable woman's courage is forever associated with that "line in the sand" in every decent person's humanity.

Somehow as the men from the FBI unpack their kit and the international legal community who knew and respected Nelson ponder just what unionists attempted to kill here, I have a sense that this time the moral derelicts have gone too far.

Just as Veronica Guerin's murder unleashed the forces that destroyed organised gangsterism in this state, so too Rosemary Nelson's death will unleash forces that will finally end the scandal of a "policing force" without a police force.

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