A Secret Hand Behind the Garvaghy Crisis?

With the 35 Orange brethren and a tracksuited Jamie Bryson unlikely to make it down the Garvaghy Road anytime soon, a question of cui bono hangs over today’s events in Armagh.

Sinn Féin walked into the trap and now finds itself pushed into an increasingly tribal position, with senior figures potentially facing police scrutiny from a force they administer.

Mary Lou McDonald may end the week with a powerful image and a reassured nationalist grassroots, but that comes at a cost: it complicates the party’s effort to present itself as a majority-building force ahead of any future border poll.

Northern unionism hardly emerges stronger. Already unsettled by Donald Trump’s interventions and the political fallout surrounding Jeffrey Donaldson, sections of unionism appear to be drifting towards ever more erratic and confrontational positioning in an effort to reassure a restless base.

Stormont, already fragile, looks destined not to make it out of the Garvaghy farce, with the renewed polarisation benefiting actors potentially away from the livestreams.

Indeed, the standoff in Armagh originates almost exclusively in a written PSNI intelligence assessment which cleared the way for the Parade’s Commission to sign off Portadown District LOL No. 1, making their sought-after stroll unleash the day’s conflagration.

Specifically, securocrats made written and oral submissions saying that, on the intelligence available to them at the time, they had no information indicating that the parade would result in disorder or violence. The Commission said that, because of the PSNI’s operational expertise, that assessment had to receive “significant weight.” It also considered warnings from residents, academics and political representatives about the potential for serious disorder, and explicitly acknowledged the severe disorder surrounding Drumcree in the 1990s.

Such reasoning is ludicrous on multiple levels and begs the question of what actual power games are at play.

From Stormontgate to the Belfast City Hall Flag protests, street theatre has often been engineered when and where required by actors behind the scenes. Even Dublin’s Love Ulster riots of 2006 were a conscious attempt to undermine Sinn Féin by McDowell and co.

What intelligence picture was supplied to the Parade’s Commission, by whom, what caveats accompanied it, and did it differ from the risk picture being used operationally inside the PSNI?

This was not an obscure parade. Garvaghy Road had been effectively closed to the Orange Order since 1998, after one of the most destabilising disputes of the peace-process era. The North has seen intelligence, policing and political events interact in ways whose full institutional logic only became visible years later. 

The British security state is hardly homogenous. Elements stabbed London in the back over the Windsor Framework while others (potentially with a hand in this week’s political turmoil) would dearly like to ruin republicanism’s’ post-GFA political credibility to shore up a weakening union.

Sinn Féin’s northern strategy depends on occupying two positions simultaneously: defender of nationalist communities and responsible administrator of the institutions, including policing. A deliberately engineered confrontation over Garvaghy Road would exploit that contradiction, forcing the party either to alienate its base or to appear at odds with the institutions it helped legitimise.

The northern peace process operates by normalising and obfuscating the real intel-led levers of power that wield a working veto over events. Garvaghy illustrates that these forces can and will enter the arena to tip the scales as required.