Debate contribution: Parades Commission: Drumcree Determination
Debate contribution by Mr Eóin Tennyson on .
- MLA
- Mr Eóin Tennyson
- Party at the time
- Alliance Party
- Date
- 28 September 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Matter of the Day
- Heading
- Parades Commission: Drumcree Determination
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5761701
Read the official Assembly record
Text
People outside this Building are in utter despair that this is where we are as a society this afternoon. People who are old enough to remember the Drumcree dispute are traumatised because they are reliving the hurt and pain of that period and having to sit down with their children — children who should never have known that level of tribalism and sectarianism — and explain the history of that dispute. There are no winners in this. This is a deliberate strategy of division. It is a zero-sum game. The residents, who are traumatised after the weekend, certainly do not win. The Orange Order does not win, as local accommodations will now be picked apart and more marches will be contested. The parties who win, however, are those who thrive on division and have nothing to offer this society but division, because they do not want to talk about their failure to deliver anything for the working-class communities that they purport to represent and have no vision for the future. We need to get this off the streets and into mediation, because our history tells us that mediation, dialogue, respect and tolerance are the only way forward for this society. The residents in that area and people across Northern Ireland deserve that leadership now, because it has, sadly, been missing over the past weeks and months. We need to ask ourselves this: where do we want to go as a society? Do we want to relive the past for the hell of it and learn nothing from it, or do we want to move forward towards a genuinely shared future? That is the question before the Assembly today. I know what my answer is to that question. To be clear, it means knowing what, the law says, you can do but also knowing what is right for community relations. That is what we all need to reflect on. We need to remain committed to these institutions. There needs to be cooperation with the investigations that will no doubt flow, unfortunately, from the weekend. All parties need to be committed to respecting the PSNI's role and upholding the rule of law.
Equally, we need to work through it in these institutions. This is when the institutions really matter, because, if power-sharing falls, others will seek to fill that void and drag this society backwards.
393 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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