Loyalist Parades Through Nationalist Areas with PSF’s Help

Loyalist Parades Through Nationalist Areas with PSF’s Help

The revelation that PSF may get involved with the Loyalist Band Forum to police Loyalist Parades through Nationalist areas where they are not welcome comes as no surprise to the republican and nationalist base.

PSF have for some time been involved with Loyalists to ensure that at least one Loyalist parade will be allowed through Nationalist areas, areas where they are not wanted and where there is a history of mob riots emanating from those in the parades. Areas where residents and business people have asked why loyalists want to parade through their locality? The only logical explanation to answer such a question, is to raise sectarian tensions and to act in a triumphalist manner against the nationalist people. In other words the Nationalist people are to be treated as second class citizens, a trait familiar to former Stormont administrations, and it would now seem, to contemporary regimes also..

One such flashpoint is Castlederg in West Tyrone.

For over thirty years loyalist bands and supporters have created havoc in the Nationalist Ferguson Crescent and Killeter Road area of the town despite appeals from residents and business people to stop such sectarian parades.

In the past such parades were forced through assisted by British Police in Ireland, in more recent years when parades were prohibited from this area the security was such that no one could get in or out of the town until such parades were over and this usually lasted up to three hours and more.

The most recent exposure of PSF’s involvement occurred over the past number of weeks. Pro-PSF community leaders have held meetings with the people in the affected area and despite being asked at every meeting if there was any contact relating to a parade going through their areas, the answer was no.

Then at the last meeting attended by British MP Pat Doherty and local PSF Cllr C Mc Hugh it was outlined that during contact with loyalists and the parades people, it was agreed that a band parade to remember a UDR man would be permitted.
The people of the area were furious that PSF had undertaken to represent them in this way without consultation and without permission to speak on their behalf and they left the PSF MP in no doubt of their feelings and were they stood on this issue.
They see such a parade as sectarian and unnecessary to march through a Nationalist area.

Within days of the meeting PSF spin was that a parade was being forced through this area only for the representation of PSF MP Pat Doherty.

Such lies emanating from a party that once supported the beleaguered Nationalist communities from sectarian taunts and riots, to now being directly involved with such parades of hate, is indicative of just how deeply PSF have been absorbed into the partitioned statelet.

This feeble attempt by PSF to create the façade of normalization, a well worn policy of successive British Governments, will not fool anyone least of all the Nationalist people of Castlederg who have suffered greatly as a result of such sectarian parades.

More outrageous in this saga is the news emanating that in return for allowing this parade through Castlederg PSF would be allowed to police it.

Another attempt by PSF to uphold British rule at every opportunity at the expense of the Nationalist and Republican people, in return for nothing.

PSF have achieved nothing for the working class people in West Tyrone.

They have achieved no advantage in the struggle for Independence.

Rather they continue to deny fellow citizens the right to National Self-determination and they fail to uphold the Sovereignty of the Irish Nation, a cause for which the leaders of 1916 (The Provisional Government of Ireland) gave their lives when executed by the British Government.

The National Chairperson of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, Francie Mackey, urges all Nationalist communities to be vigilant in light of these treacherous moves by PSF and states that never again should Nationalist areas have to suffer the indignation of such sectarian parades through their areas.

This was the trait of the previous Stormont when Nationalist skulls were cracked by British Police in Ireland to force such parades through and now we have the present Stormont attempting the exact same policy. What has changed?