WHAT made the difference do you think? Why did the Orange Order accept a determination even more draconian than before from the Parades Commission,  curtailing their behaviour passing St Patrick’s Church on Donegall Street? Why did the Carrick Hill residents call off their protest? Do you think it had anything to do with Prince Charles’s visit to the church? Some evidence points to that conclusion. For example, Depooty Dawds[Depurty Dodds], that prominent Orangeman with the blue collarette, let fly at the Parades Commission for, in his opinion, making an ‘implicit reference’ to royalty’s visit to the church.

The furiously defensive language from DD attacking the Parades Commission’s mention of ‘recent high profile events’ at the church as ‘an utter disgrace’ amply demonstrated his discomfort. He knew the anti-Catholic organisation had been banjaxed. If anything happened outside or near the church the obvious contradictions would have been seriously detrimental to the Orangemen.

It would certainly have reached the British media. The ‘recent high profile events’ also allowed the Parades Commission to ramp up its strictures and impose a ban on music within earshot of the church.

That determination gave the Carrick Hill residents what they wanted so there was no need to stand there to expose the barbarous antics of the Loyalist bands prancing past. Those bands, of course, have nothing to do with the Orange lodges.” They only hire them you see, and pay them. So the Orange Order couldn’t be responsible for what they get up to.”

So far so good but there’s more going on here than simply embarrassing the Orange Order into behaving. There, before their unseeing eyes was an exercise in equality of status and parity of esteem, something the Orange Order was founded to prevent and has resisted resolutely for two hundred years, by coincidence the same length of time St Patrick’s church has been there. Dodds had to watch his party leader being greeted by the administrator of St Patrick’s, Fr Michael Sheehan, whose church has been slighted annually for decades by DD’s crowd. The local MP couldn’t make the event although the Dean of Belfast from St Anne’s just down Donegall Street was there jointly conducting a service.

Even the hitherto impenetrable skulls of the Orange leaders got the message. The ridiculous grand old Duke of York posturing Grand Chaplain, former Special Branch man Rev Mervyn ‘culture war’ Gibson, was let out briefly to bellow impotently at the Parades Commission (and what an attractive advert for RUC Special Branch he is) but then meekly toe the line. The heir to his queen evidently didn’t share Gibson’s nonsensical inflammatory opinions.

The whole procession of the royal visit through the Republic, visiting symbolic locations, meeting the President, Taoiseach, Gerry Adams, then in the north Martin McGuinness, Catholic clergy and so on, despite sniggers and contempt from dissident republicans, is another milestone on the lengthy route towards equality between Britain and Ireland and between northern nationalists and the British. There’s no bowing and scraping between Sinn Féin leaders and royalty. They meet on equal footing, shake hands, have a chat. This process of establishing equality of status has also become a public demonstration that Unionists are the problem. The absence of leadership in unionism has left the bewildered shock troops leaning on their halberds and ceremonial swords (when they’re not whacking police with them) onlookers at republicans taking over the north, asserting themselves at war memorials, state occasions, places unionists excluded them from.

The Good Friday Agreement formally recognised the validity of nationalist and republican identity, rights and aspirations. No wonder Jeffrey Donaldson said in May that the DUP ‘did not support the Belfast Agreement’, as unionists call it, and ‘has no affinity with it’. When you see what the queen, the royal family and the British government have been trying to tell unionists with pageant, symbolism and allegory, you can understand why Jeffrey and his DUP colleagues reject it.

They’re now the only people in the universe apart from their mirror image among dissident republicans who won’t speak to Sinn Féin people. When Prince Charles can chat to Gerry Adams, albeit protected by a strategic cup and saucer, it’s a bit rich for the likes of Gregory Campbell to refuse.