Police apology after falsely flagging Belfast parade as sensitive: Top officer admits PSNI got it wrong on Apprentice Boys deal with Crumlin Road residents for Easter event
A senior Belfast police officer has apologised after the PSNI falsely listed an Easter Monday parade by the Apprentice Boys as a potential problem.
When the organisation last month filed an application to parade along Crumlin Road in the north of the city, the police told the Parades Commission it should be flagged as sensitive – a move that outraged the marchers, and that the PSNI now admit they got wrong.
Issuing an apology, a senior officer said the force mistakenly believed marchers had rejected a deal with Crumlin Road residents to smooth the parade’s passage.
After the Apprentice Boys branch told them the deal was in place and had been for more than a decade, the police withdrew the sensitivity flag.
But that was more than a week after the parade application was originally filed, leaving the marchers fuming – and, say community activists, having lost a lot of trust in the PSNI.
Tommy Cheevers, who submitted the application on behalf of Ligoniel Walker Club, said the path to getting the false “sensitive” marking removed was “woefully difficult”.
“Internal decision-making and responsibilities seem to be as unclear to the PSNI as it is to everyone else involved,” he told the News Letter, adding that the police had initially pointed a finger at the Parades Commission for listing the parade as contentious, while the Parades Commission blamed the police.
"Honesty has to be the cornerstone of any engagement, and the PSNI failing to simply admit an error and trying to transfer responsibility and blame to another public body isn’t helpful,” Mr Cheevers added.
The Parades Commission confirmed that the PSNI forwarded the parade application to them marked as sensitive after it was submitted on March 24, and on April 2 contacted the Commission to state that, in fact, it wasn’t. The Commission didn’t make any ruling on the issue.
Belfast PSNI Superintendent Allister Hagan apologised for the force’s handling of the case, blaming a “genuine misunderstanding” about what was happening on the ground.
"Police indicated that there were sensitivities connected to the route due to our mistaken understanding that a local agreement between parading organisations and the community, in which a number of parades were mutually agreed to pass without protest, had been rejected by all marching organisations that were party to the agreement,” he said. “This led the Parades Commission to mark the parade as sensitive on its website.
"We were contacted by the Apprentice Boys to say that the agreement was, in fact, still in place for the Easter Monday parade and asking that we correct the information given to the Commission. We then sought confirmation from those who act as guarantors of the local agreement, and updated the Commission accordingly that we no longer assess there to be sensitivities with the parade.
"We apologise for any community concern or upset that may have arisen from our genuine misunderstanding of the status of the local agreement relating to the Apprentice Boys parade as this was, of course, never our intention.
"We hope that by taking steps to clarify the position relating to the agreement and informing the Parades Commission of the same, this has gone some way towards rectifying the issue.”