'Tour of the North' Parade

Protestant children enjoy the 'Tour of the North' parade, June 1999.
TOUR OF THE NORTH
The 'Tour of the North' is a bi-annual parade through north Belfast, organised by the Orange Order. The parade takes place in June and involves up to 3,000 participants from around 50 Orange Order lodges. As with other Orange Order parades, it is accompanied by bands, which Catholics describe as 'Kick the Pope' bands, due to the fact that they play music which Catholics regard as sectarian and triumphalist. In recent years, the parade has generated increasing controversy as it passes through and near various nationalist areas along its route. In the past this has resulted in confrontation and violent exchanges between marchers and Catholic residents.
Like other parades in Northern Ireland, the Tour of the North is now subject to approval by the Parades Commission and the Commission has placed restrictions on it by re-routing it away from the most contentious areas. The Orange Order opposes this re-routing of what they regard as a 'traditional' parade route. They claim that the Tour of the North plays an important role in linking 'isolated' sections of the Protestant community. The Parades Commission, however, has ruled that demographic changes bring the parade too close to Catholic areas and, subsequently, brings too much potential for public disorder.

THE ORANGE ORDER
The Loyal Orange Institution (the Orange Order) is an exclusively Protestant fraternity founded in Armagh in September 1795 following sectarian and agrarian clashes with Catholics in Co Armagh. The institution commemorates the 17th century battle for supremacy between Protestantism and Catholicism in the British Isles, culminating with the final victory of the Dutch King William of Orange over the Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland on 12 July 1690 (The Twelfth).

The Orange Order's aims are to defend and uphold the Protestant faith and a Protestant monarchy in the UK. It describes itself as primarily a religious organisation that defends Protestant civil and religious liberties, expresses Protestant culture and “accepts its political responsibilities”.
At the core of Protestant civil and religious liberties is the right to parade, with The Twelfth remaining the most important date in the Orange Calendar. In the 1990s, the routes of some of these marches became a source of bitter, often violent, dispute between Protestants and Catholics who took radically different views of what the parades represent. For the Orange Order, they are an expression of their culture and heritage. For Catholics, they are a sectarian assertion of Protestant supremacy over Catholics in Northern Ireland. In the 1990s Catholics in some areas formed residents associations to demand the re-routing of Orange parades. The Orange Order condemned these demands as an assault on their civil, religious and cultural liberties. The polarisation was dramatically exposed at Drumcree in Portadown, Co Armagh, in 1998 and thereafter in other flashpoint areas in Northern Ireland.

In 1997 the independent Parades Commission was established to rule on parades in Northern Ireland. The Commission's decisions have met with criticism from both communities, with the Orange Order condemning the Commission as “cultural fascists” while for Catholics their decisions don't go far enough.

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