High Court clears first Garvaghy Road march since 1998, Belfast marches out to stop it instead

…(cont) In September 2021 the European Union answered a British request to renegotiate the trade terms separating Northern Ireland from the rest of Britain: no.

Eight months after that, in May 2022, Sinn Féin took the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the first time a unionist party had not won the most seats since the state was founded in 1921 — a hundred and one years of one outcome, broken.

The Washington Examiner, reviewing that same document, called it long on that language and short on any concrete promise of a way out. Thirteen days later, the High Court gave that warning something to test.

On Sunday the court sat late into the night — no penny-ante hour for a ruling like this — and cleared the Orange Order to walk Garvaghy Road for the first time since the taboo was born. Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for calm the same day, which is what a prime minister says when calm is already leaving the room. Thousands of protesters gathered in Portadown and blocked the route instead, holding by hand the line the ruling had just erased on paper. The court did not revive a march. It revived twenty-eight years of a fight that had gone untested since 1998, and old fights do not stay polite once they are tested again; this shit did not, either, in front of the cameras this time.

The taboo is survived by the court that ended it and by the ministers who, thirteen days earlier, had warned the union itself might not hold much longer. It is preceded in death by nothing; it simply held until Sunday, then stopped, the same way the march did in 1998.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners read the 1998 agreement the taboo was born under, and ask their own representatives whether they have read it too.