Tonight, the Secretary of State made the right call to stop this unwanted march from going ahead. But nobody should be in any doubt about what produced it.
This didn’t come from the Parades Commission, which folded the moment the DUP and the TUV turned up the pressure. It didn’t come from the courts, which made a series of harried decisions through the night. Nor did it come from a Secretary of State who spent nearly a fortnight disingenuously insisting his hands were tied.
It came from the community of the Garvaghy Road, as well as thousands of ordinary people standing with them over the past two weeks. Working class communities organised from below forced every institution in this place to move. That is a lesson that should never be forgotten.
This crisis has also exposed the utter failure of ruling class unionism to deliver. The DUP can’t build houses. It can’t get people a hospital appointment. It can’t deliver a single thing for the communities it claims to speak for. It reaches for sectarian division instead, because division is the only thing it has ever reliably produced. Working class Protestants are on the same housing lists and in the same hospital queues as their Catholic neighbours, and no march down anybody’s road has ever changed that.
The Orange Order was built for exactly this job. Orangeism is not a culture, but an instrument for keeping working people apart while those at the top hold on to what they have. We should expect unionist elites to fight this all the way. More court action, more talk of surrender to the mob, possibly even collapsing the institutions in protest. Let them try.
The political leaders of unionism - elected and unelected - spent two weeks trying to mobilise a base that did not turn out, because most Protestants and unionists in this country have no appetite whatsoever for a return to the bigotry of the past. The days when unionist supremacy could simply be imposed on people are gone and they are not coming back.
What replaces it is up to us. Not a united Ireland run by the same landlords and developers who run things now, but a socialist Ireland built by working class people - of all backgrounds and from all communities - organised together. We’ve seen a glimpse of what that looks like on the Garvaghy Road. Our job now is to build it across Ireland.
