ANALYSIS:The marching season and dissidents are making life difficult for the North's main parties, writes DAN KEENAN.
RECRIMINATION HAS filled the air that was only just cleared of the black smoke from Ardoyne’s worst riot in years.
Sinn Féin has blamed the Orange Order and dissident republicans for the trouble, the former for providing the cause and the latter for orchestrating the on-street response.
As ever, Ardoyne’s hoodie-clad youngsters – many of them too young to recall the Good Friday agreement let alone the Troubles – were the ones providing the dramatic and depressing TV pictures. Those behind it all were much more discreet.
Éirígí, the socialist republican group represented by the high profile figure Breandán Mac Cionnaith, has rubbished Gerry Adams’s finger-pointing and challenged Sinn Féin to face up to its current position as backers of the PSNI.
The Orange Order has blamed republicans, accusing them of intolerance and hypocrisy and claiming equality is a two-way street and involves both freedoms and responsibilities.
To some effect, senior Orange figures like Grand Secretary Drew Nelson are using nationalist arguments against Sinn Féin.
Tolerance, respect and equality, once the simple yet powerful demands of nationalists since the heady days of civil rights in 1968, echoed from the platforms at many of the Twelfth events on Monday. The arguments seem now to be settling into a dull and mutual resentment – a circular debate. One side demands to know why residents cannot keep their hands in their pockets for 10 minutes while an Orange lodge steps past their front doors.
The rhetorical question is matched with another: why do Orangemen insist on parading through areas where they are clearly not wanted?
And so it goes on, the various political parties falling into the various camps while the debate goes nowhere.
In the middle stands the riot-clad PSNI, now backed by all parties in the Assembly. Alistair Finlay, Belfast’s most senior officer, had a more assured media performance yesterday and his analysis of the Ardoyne trouble was utterly believable.
This is in contrast to the roasting he got following last month’s racist attacks in south Belfast when his officers were accused of not responding quickly enough to the plight of Roma victims of harassment.
But both cases show just how carefully the PSNI has to tread. It is tempting to think that both Sinn Féin and the DUP could privately be thankful that justice powers have yet to be devolved.
Not that that looks likely anytime soon. This marching season, and dissident opposition, are making life more difficult for Sinn Féin while the disastrous European results have clipped the DUP’s wings.
Martin McGuinness’s warnings last month at Bodenstown that his party could not “stretch” its support base in an effort to prevent Ardoyne-style trouble were indeed words made flesh this week.
While Gerry Kelly and other senior republicans were at the flashpoint on Monday night, their concerted effort to keep the young hotheads at bay were less visible. Either they wouldn’t stop the youngsters, which is worrying; or they couldn’t, which is yet more worrying.
Peter Robinson, too, has his own dissident problem of sorts. Jim Allister is all fired up after a stunning European election performance and his threats to hand out P45s to key DUP figures at forthcoming elections are gaining in value by the day.
The first of those is at most 10 months away. Westminster elections are crudely simple affairs, stripped of the tactical complexity of PR voting.
An eloquent firebrand with a simple and potent message – No terrorists in government – Allister will have a simple job compared to the DUP leadership.
Rushing to end double-jobbing and dented by the expenses scandal, Robinson has much to do to hold on to all the territory his shock troops stormed while the Rev Paisley was still [notionally] in charge. Unionists are too well aware of the significance of losing a single inch – imagine the blow of losing a whole constituency.
With both leading parties under attack from their exposed flanks and with elections close at hand, the political scene is hardly pregnant with possibility.
None of which is to suggest that despair is necessarily in order. The last full-on riot in Ardoyne in 2005 also provoked a political fallout. But within two weeks the IRA felt secure enough to call off its 35-year campaign and to decommission its arsenal two months later.