Sir, - Whatever Rev Dr Gordon Graham's self-professed liberal credentials (March 27th), he does them and his argument about the right to march no good whatever by equating Orange Order demonstrations with the Bloody Sunday protest of January 1972.
As an 18-year-old Roman Catholic student, I took part in that fateful protest (and many another) against all that was corrupt and rancid in the rotten borough of Northern Ireland, of which my home town of Derry was a microcosm. Endemic in the disease afflicting the northern body politic was the privileged position of the all-pervasive Orange Order with its pathological Protestant paranoia against my community. Every July 12th was an occasion for triumphalist coat-trailing. From Orange platforms ministers of both the cloth and the Cabinet would direct foul, offensive racist invective against the gerrymandered minority's ethos, under the watchful eyes of their brethren in the RUC.
The Orange Order was an integral component of the establishment responsible for the Bloody Sunday massacre when it was decided - yet again - that if the Croppies would not lie down, they must be put down. Even now, the Order (still with a widespread membership among the Northern judiciary, police and military, civil service and local government) opposes any new inquiry into the events of, and background to, that day - which some of its leaders have termed "Good Sunday". And these are the people with whom the Lord Mayor of Dublin wishes to celebrate diversity! - Yours, etc.,
Nigel Cooke, Munster Road, Liverpool, England.