“It is dangerous to put limitations on their freedoms”

MICHAEL Rosie has been watching parades for years. The Edinburgh University academic advises Government on the issue. For him, what happened during the Orange Order’s Boyne parade earlier this year was shocking because it was unusual, not because it was commonplace.

“These things generally don’t happen very often at parades,” Rosie explains. There was a palpable sense of ‘wow, what just happened?’”

Rosie sees Orangism’s historic decline. Before July 7, the movement was probably, he suggests, having a feelgood summer. It had hosted the DUP leader Arlene Fraser in Cowdenbeath. Even early reports of the Boyne parades had been positive – until news of an incident at St Alphonsus.

But the big picture, he says, was decline. “In 1950, there was a parade in Edinburgh which had 50,000 Orangemen and women. In Glasgow, in 2018, the biggest of the parades had 4,000.

“Councils have told me they are much happier dealing with a parade with one of these groups because they know what they are doing.

“They are going to turn up when they say they are going to turn up and they are going to march where they say they are going to march.”

So what has changed since the summer? Until July, Rosie says, people saw marches as a nuisance. “Probably a strong majority of people are uncomfortable with loyal order parades,” he says. “People would see it as a pest. An annoyance.”

Now there is a different mood. “We have a widespread sensation that these parades are deeply problematic. That they cause severe division and dislocation in our society. That they may provoke violence, deeply offensive grotesque behaviour.

“There is a sense of both Irish Republicanism and loyalism being out of step, out of place, out of time. Of ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘What as this got to do with 21st-century Scotland?’ ‘Why are you here?’ Especially outside Glasgow.”

Rosie, however, is worried about parts of this new mood, and some of the politics around it. He says: “I think there has been an unhelpful politicisation of sectarianism since about 2016 when the SNP lost its majority. There was a great desire among other parties ‘to give the Nats a bloody nose’.

“Unfortunately, it was the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act which was the focus of that bloody nose. I say ‘unfortunately’ not because of the act – people were quite right to see that as open to criticism. But because the act is so wrapped up with issues around sectarianism and football.

“It meant that for the first time in five years people in politics were taking positions on things that impact concerns about sectarianism.

“At the moment we are not in a great place. We are back to the days when there was a lot of posturing politics around this. Rather than a willingness to sit down and have difficult conversations, there is a retreat to simple formulas.

“I have never once met a person who said ‘See this sectarian stuff, I am part of that.’ It is always someone else, the other lot down the road.”

Rosie is concerned about polarisation, of one side no longer seeing the other’s view. “If you think the Orange Order is beyond the pale, you can never accept them walking down the road or passed a school or a church.

“But if they are not breaking the law, it is dangerous to put limitations on their freedoms.”