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29 August 2014

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Even RUC chief Jack Hermon despaired of Orange ‘sheer unreasonableness’ on parades


RUC Chief Constable Sir Jack Hermon was privately critical of the “sheer unreasonableness” of the Orange Order in 1985 for insisting it could march wherever it wanted.

Historian Eamon Phoenix says that state papers from 1985 released today show that, whatever British Government officials said publicly, behind closed doors they were exasperated by the Orange Order’s stubbornness.

In March 1985, the NIO wrote to Bishop Robin Eames about the parades issue. He felt a direct appeal should be made to the Orange Order and other unionist organisations by the Secretary of State, Douglas Hurd. 

Hurd then wrote to leading Orangemen James Molyneaux and Reverend Martin Smyth, both Ulster Unionist MPs.

He urged them to use influence to ensure that “as far as possible, processions and parades avoid flashpoint and sensitive areas”.

Jack Hermon

Their response, if any, is not recorded but Comments by RUC Chief Constable Jack Hermon (pictured) to a NIO official are noted in a file which says:

“[The RUC Chief Constable’s] instinct would be to encourage the Secretary of State to challenge the Orange and Black [Royal Black Institution] leadership over the whole basis of traditional marches at the moral level, pointing out the sheer unreasonableness and injustice of their continuing to insist on going through or past the same areas as of yore, quite irrespective of whether the communities living in those areas had changed completely.”

The NIO official noted that the RUC Chief Constable had impressed on him:

“For the nationalists, this was a massive dose of inequality.”

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