Northern Ireland leaders appealed for calm and police braced for trouble in advance of Friday’s Protestant parades and bonfires on “the Twelfth,” an annual sectarian holiday that always inflames tensions with the Catholic minority.
The police commander, Chief Constable Matt Baggott, took the unusual step of importing 630 police officers from England and Scotland to beef up his own 7,000-member force. The officers have already received Northern Ireland-specific riot training as part of their initial deployment to the British territory last month to provide security for the Group of Eight summit of world leaders.
Baggott said the reinforcements would be needed to help deter trouble Friday when the major British Protestant brotherhood, the Orange Order, mounts 550 parades in commemoration of a 17th century military victory over Irish Catholics. He said 43 parades, an unusually high number, would pass near potentially hostile Catholic areas.
Britain’s Cabinet minister for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers, and the justice minister of Northern Ireland’s unity government, David Ford, on Thursday met some of the officers tasked with keeping order on July 12, the most hallowed date on the Orange calendar. They both said police were confident of containing any street clashes and keeping extremists from both sides apart.
For more than two centuries, Orangemen have marched to commemorate July 12, 1690, when forces loyal to William of Orange, the newly crowned Protestant king of England, routed the army of the deposed Catholic king, James II, in a river valley south of Belfast. Orangemen march beneath banners portraying the British crown atop an open Bible and proclaim William as defender of their civil and religious liberty on what was then, and now, a mostly Catholic island.
Most Catholics loathe the marches as a Protestant effort to intimidate and insult them, a view underscored by the Orangemen’s accompaniment on parade by so-called kick the pope bands of fife and drum playing a mixture of Gospel and sectarian tunes.
“People have a choice to make tomorrow. Violence is in no way inevitable,” said Assistant Chief Constable Will Kerr, who is overseeing police operations in Belfast, where violence has followed the Twelfth parades every year since 2009.