Kenneth Bloomfield

On the 24th of May, Faulkner, Oliver Napier of the Alliance Party and Gerry Fitt, leader of the SDLP, second in the Executive, and a Member of Parliament for West Belfast, met the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, at Shackers, his stately office in Buckinghamshire.

Napier came with Ken Bloomfield, the Senior Civil Servant of the Executive, and his Senior Advisor, Tom Roberts.

All three were helicoptered in the Aldergrove airport, where, joining Faulkner, they took a plane bound for RAF Northolt.

Behind them, they left a world where ministerial cars no longer worked because of a lack of petrol, where the routes were closed off by the strikers in depth, and they had to be helicoptered from army bases to cabinet meetings and back, where the writ did not run even as far as Dundonald House.

And of course, the marches have not taken place since then.

And from my point of view, this I mean, it's not for me to criticise, but most definitely my observation is that the Parades Commission have been utterly and utterly at fault here for allowing a parade to go ahead that has been one of, if not the most contentious parade that goes right back to the mid 80s, when both the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the head of the civil servant, Kenneth Bloomfield, contacted the government, contacted everybody to say this parade should not be going ahead.

That's in the 80s, not in the 90s.

And remember that the Garvahy Road march and the contentious march was extremely difficult, extremely terrifying.