There will be no banning or rerouting. They will take place just as they
always have. Bonfires aren't up for negotiation.
A very defensive attitude exists to Eleventh Night celebrations in many
areas. Criticism is seen as another attempt to neuter Protestant culture.
This week's DOE advisory leaflet on bonfires could well join Celtic shirts,
tricolours and Gerry Adams' effigies, at the top of the pyre in July.
But urging a rethink about bonfires isn't just part of a big republican plot
to destroy loyalism.
Burning tyres release more than 100 different chemicals into the air, many
of which can cause cancer and respiratory diseases. That's not nationalist
propaganda. It's fact.
If the St Patrick's Day City Hall concert - of which I'm not a fan - led to
327 calls to the emergency services, there'd (rightly) be uproar. Yet that's
how many incidents the fire service responded to last 11th July.
Catholics might drive past the piles of festering rubbish, and later the
damaged roads, street signs and lighting, but it's Protestants who have to
actually live with it.
Nationalists themselves have largely abandoned the tradition of bonfires to
mark the introduction of internment in 1971. So it's not a case of double
standards on this one.
Why can't loyalists organise more creative events than burning rubbish to
coincide with the Twelfth parades? Does a community festival of open-air
concerts, film, comedy and theatre have to be a purely nationalist preserve?
Looking down on the River Lagan and Botanic Gardens, Annadale Embankment
should be a pleasant spot on an early summer's evening. It has a stretch of
greenery that would be the envy of residents of many blocks of flats in
urban Britain. Yet it has been turned into an absolute eyesore. If that's
tradition, it's far from a good thing.
