This Blog has never favoured the Protestant Unionists of Northern Ireland and after last night it favours them even less. The Orange Order is a shocking throwback into historical conflict which infects each new generation with a virus of prejudice and intolerance, which gives its members and the mobs who trail them a licence to provoke, insult and inflame.
The Orange Order would be shut down if it operated in this way on the mainland of the UK, with its absurd marches routed to cause maximum insult to what it sees as the descendants of its enemy at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. This wholly uncivilised conduct must be stamped out. Let the Unionists be in no doubt that the British people have moved on from this kind of poisonous approach to community relations and that their patience may snap. This could lead to a referendum to dissolve the Union held not just in Ulster, but across the whole of the UK. There is little doubt it would be carried and then these nasty people would find themselves cast at the mercy of those they have insulted, abused and persecuted for centuries. Serve them right.
It’s time for Unionists to wake up to the fact that wherever in the calendar they suppose themselves to be living, the rest of the world is in the twenty-first century.