Fintan O'Toole: Drumcree is theatre of the absurd, straight from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks

Economists will tell us you can’t have inflation and deflation at the same time. But then they’ve never been to Portadown. The trick of tribal politics is to combine bigging-up with belittlement. Grievance is magnified; grief is diminished.On one side of the Drumcree/Garvaghy Road standoff, there is a monstrous mismatch between the supposed grand purpose of the Orange parade and its mean little reality. The march is claimed to be a commemoration not only of the Battle of the Boyne, but of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, in which there were over a million casualties, including about 300,000 deaths. This was a catastrophe shared by Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics – around 3,500 men from the island of Ireland, serving in the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions, lost their lives. How should a European cataclysm of such unimaginable dimensions be commemorated? What form of ritual solemnity could be expressive of a deep enough sorrow? How about walking down a road just to get a rise out of the neighbours?READ MOREThere is only one thing that joins the Somme and the Drumcree parade – a profound sense of futility. In the theatre of the absurd, the Somme is the tragic epic, Drumcree the am-dram village-hall staging of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch.No one has ever tried to stop the Orangemen from marching to and from Drumcree. Their point is that they cannot bear to walk home the way they walked out – the route must, at all costs, be circular. A straight line represents intolerable oppression.This hyping up is also a terrible dumbing down. It dishonours the memory of the dead. It does so in macrocosm by turning the immense tragedy of the Somme into desultory farce. And then it does so in microcosm by disregarding the 21 people, including the children Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn, who died in the violence surrounding the previous Drumcree conflict of 1996 to 1999.But let’s not forget that there’s a similarly grotesque inflation on the other side. A banner reads: “From Gaza to Garvaghy Rd, Resist Occupation & Fascism”. Just as the Orangemen use the vast horror of the Somme to make themselves look epic, this comparison of the difficult situation faced by Garvaghy Road residents to the pulverising of three entire cities, the killing of at least 73,000 people and the wounding of 173,000, the killing or wounding of 64,000 children and the obliteration of schools, libraries, mosques and medical centres, is obscene overstatement.Anyone with a knowledge either of history or of the contemporary world should know what occupation and fascism look like. Northern Ireland is not occupied – its sovereignty is entirely a matter to be decided by a majority of its population in a democratic vote. And 35 oul’ fellas in suits walking silently down a road at 8am is not fascism. Nor does it need to be in order to be visibly wrong. The Parades Commission’s determination to allow the slimmed-down parade is foolish enough in its combination of recklessness and complacency not to require amplification into a world-historical catastrophe.This egregious exaggeration is a return to what Liam Kennedy memorably called MOPE syndrome – Most Oppressed People Ever. During the Troubles, car bombs and the slaughter of civilians were justified by the pretence that the situation of Catholics in Northern Ireland was just like that of Black people under apartheid in South Africa or the Jim Crow regime in the southern states of the US. This wasn’t true then. Anti-Catholic discrimination under the unionist monopoly of power was open, official and obvious. It was bad enough – it didn’t need overblown comparisons. And it’s even less true now. There is no anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland now. The Orange state is long gone: the very fact that the First Minister Michelle O’Neill is out protesting on the side of the Garvaghy Road residents tells us so. But if you can’t credibly evoke apartheid or Jim Crow, reach for Gaza.Why all this hype? Because the political soup of the day is competitive victimhood. Slights cannot be slight. Frustrations cannot be mere irritants. Disappointments cannot be just let-downs. Every insult must be existential, every provocation unendurable. In this sense, the 2026 Drumcree/Garvaghy Road drama is not only a return to the nightmare of the 1990s. It’s also a very 21st century production. We live in a culture in which, for example, Liam Gallagher can compare the plight of his cheating club Manchester City to “Jesus prepared to die on the cross”. A sense of proportion doesn’t play well on X. We used to pray that Northern Ireland would become more like the rest of the world – what’s happened, of course, is that the rest of the world has become more like Northern Ireland. Polarisation is the engine of politics across the democratic world – and it requires minor flashpoints to be stoked up into major conflagrations.Everybody must be a victim. In reality, the Orange Order is a declining institution. Its membership halved between 1948 and 2009 and has continued to drop since. Its influence, once pervasive, is minimal. Its only hope is to be the vector, not of Protestant supremacy but of Protestant victimhood – not being allowed to walk in a circle is woeful oppression. But to respond to toxic hyperbole with counter-hyperbole is not just unwise but profoundly disrespectful of real suffering. When you map Gaza on to Garvaghy, you inflate the latter but simultaneously deflate the former. In this false equivalence, the scale of the horror that is still being inflicted on Palestinians is brought down to the level of a nasty local row.There is no need to summon the vast throngs of the dead from the Somme or Gaza. Portadown is haunted by far too many dead already. They died for the grotesque equation in which a human life is a point to be scored. Respect for their memories should be expressed in the only slogan that tells the truth: It is not worth it.