It’s the message, not the route

SIR – Your leading article entitled “Orange Order needs to take a different route” (September 12) is somewhat disingenuous in comparing protests in Ulster with those in the rest of the United Kingdom.

On the mainland, protesters from the Countryside Alliance to antiglobalisation marchers are regularly rerouted for public order reasons by those whose duty it is to uphold and enforce the law. Never is the argument about “traditional routes” heard in Great Britain – and rightly so, because it is hollow. It is the message, not the route, that matters in any protest of whatever hue.

In Ulster, a Conservative government proposed, and a Labour government enacted, the much maligned Parades Commission and its inbuilt conciliation mechanisms. These mechanisms remain unused as the loyalist orders insist on a unique, absolute and spurious right to a particular route, a right that does not exist anywhere else in the UK.

This is against the advice of impartial mediators and in defiance of the forces of law and order, and has disastrous results. It is therefore hardly surprising that the loyalist orders are generally viewed in a very negative light in Great Britain. Andrew Finch Portsmouth, Hants SIR – Members of the Orange Order whose forebears contributed significantly to Allied victory in the Second World War are genuinely bewildered by the British Government’s indifference to their cause and its lofty pose of evenhandedness between Unionists and Nationalists, as perfidious Albion prepares once more, on grounds of expediency, to abandon its supporters to their fate.

As a loyal Ulsterman, living in chosen exile in southern England, I fi nd nothing more poignant and tragic – and noble – than the dying swansong of Unionism being enacted before us all on the streets of Belfast. George Moles St Leonards-on-Sea, E. Sussex