Verging on a miracle – that's how Archbishop Robin Eames described the news that Portadown Orangemen have voted to (maybe) enter talks with the Garvaghy Road residents. Was that a back-handed Church of Ireland compliment – that it takes near divine intervention before the Orange Order will agree to discuss a contentious issue? Other unionist sources, politicians and editorial writers, were less ambiguous. "Well done the Orange Order" seemed to be the general sentiment. Now if those pesky nationalists would only show similar reasonableness, the whole business might be resolved by next year.
We've been here before, notably along the road to Holy Cross Primary school. Start with a series of nasty attacks on children, talk about the background to the dispute, urge the need for moderation, and bingo – your vicious assault has turned into a complicated dispute with much to be said on both sides. And so the victims become a part of the problem and are urged to back off, in the name of reason and progress.
People who are honest know there never was a Holy Cross dispute, not if you think of a dispute as something involving two warring sides. There were children going to school and there were thugs launching verbal and physical assaults, and except you're stupid or duplicitous, you don't start telling the victims of assault to be more reasonable.
So too the Drumcree affair. There is an organisation called the Orange Order which is fundamentally opposed to Catholicism and all it stands for. This Order demands the right to parade through an area filled with Catholics, and justifies this by saying that it's simply on its way home from a church service. This insistence on worshipping God and then marching home by a different, circuitous route has led to mayhem, murder of innocent Catholics and huge expense over the last six years.
But behold: a change of heart. As their protest begins to die on its feet, having done incalculable damage to the international image of Orangeism, the Order says it will, after all, talk to the residents. And there's more. It'll even allow the residents to appoint their own spokesman! All this, if the Portadown Orangemen are allowed to march down the Garvaghy Road one last time without the consent of residents.
This has been hailed as a new beginning, a near-supernatural event. In fact it's more like a local bully who's been allowed for years to beat up anybody he chooses. Then at last the cops arrive and restrain him, so the bully says fine, he'll be a good law-abiding boy from now on, providing he's allowed to give someone a final pasting. At which point the vicar and several local worthies go public and say they want to commend the bully for his proposed new approach to life.
When David Trimble pulled down the executive nearly a year ago, he declared that what was missing was the vital ingredient of trust. As usual, Trimble got it wrong. What's needed here, for all of us to progress, is respect, not trust. When we sign agreements, we need to respect what we've signed up to. When we talk about partnership, we need to respect those with whom we form that partnership.
And when we talk about bigoted parades and vicious assaults, we show respect for people's intelligence by not referring to them as disputes. A belated decision to talk to people you don't like isn't a miracle – it's rational act, showing a modicum of respect for those with different views. It's to be welcomed, but that doesn't mean that the victims now owe the perpetrators something. Virtue does not always lie – in fact it rarely lies – in the middle way. Sawing the baby in half makes sense only to those with a bloody sense of justice.
Drumcree has been a school of hard knocks for Orangemen. Even the dimmest of them now sees that that the old days are gone and triumphalism isn't going to work and that dialogue is the only way. The dawn of such a realisation is to be welcomed, but suggestions that this might be preceded by a final hob-nailed dance on the dignity of the Garvaghy Road residents should be denounced for what they are – absurd.
