A colourful '˜Last Saturday' close to a successful season

The statistics for what is known as the ‘Last Saturday’ make impressive reading: in Lisburn alone there were 107 Co Down preceptories and 100 bands.

Overall, the various parades involved 17,000-strong members of the senior loyal order, with demonstrations at Ballymena, Loughgall, Portadown, Castlederg and Raphoe in addition to the Lisburn turnout.

It is striking that the North-West demonstration was held peacefully in Co Donegal in the Republic. Like the Rossnowlagh Orange parade in early July and the annual Apprentice Boys parade in Londonderry earlier this month, these celebrations of Protestant culture are now uncontroversial in overwhelmingly nationalist areas.

July 12 this year was one of the best anniversaries of the Battle of the Boyne in recent decades.

Tens of thousands of people still take part each year and tens of thousands more want to watch it.

These events are some of the simplest but some of the most colourful festivals on these islands.

They happen to mark important history too, that impacted on the course of not only British and Irish history, but the direction of western Europe too and north America.

The hardcore opposition to parades comes from dissident republicans. Even Sinn Fein now accepts the need for at least a toleration of parades.

On July 12 2012, when the Parades Commission suddenly presented Orangemen with an impossibly early return slot past the neutral Ardoyne shopfronts interface, they did so to accommodate a manufactured, provocative dissident republican parade that even Gerry Kelly condemned. That the commission rewards such intransigence in the Ardoyne and a small number of other locations heaps further discredit on it.