Authorised Officers
The Parades Commission funds a team of Authorised Officers who work on the ground throughout Northern Ireland, normally in teams of two.
The six Authorised Officers are not members of the Commission staff. They are self-employed and on contract to provide services to the Commission covering a variety of tasks in their designated geographic areas. The Authorised Officers act as an important resource, enabling the Commission to promote and facilitate mediation. Their job is to understand the issues and concerns raised by the various interest groups in relation to any parade and to seek to find ways towards a local consensus or mediated accommodation about parades at a local level. They are an important source of advice to the Commission, providing an invaluable perspective of realities within individual communities.
For example, they will, in the run-up to a contentious parade, talk to many of the stakeholders in the area to establish what, if any, progress has been made on the ground in recent months; they will examine the prospects for dialogue and seek to facilitate the setting up of meetings where this is possible between the parties; they will discuss with parade organisers, residents, local clergy, community leaders and politicians the grass-root sensitivities and feelings; and they will explore the potential for proposals to take into account the concerns of those living in the area. These insights in turn provide the Commission with valuable additional knowledge to that which is presented to them in the more formal advice and evidence-gathering exercise that is part of the procedure leading to a determination (if one is required).
There are good examples of situations where the Authorised Officers have brought together, for the first time, people who represent opposing views on individual parades. There are other examples where they have brokered sufficient compromises on either or both sides that have obviated the need for any determination to be made. There are instances of the introduction of mediators into disputes that has, in turn, led to some progress being made. This kind of publicly-funded approach to resolving parading disputes is unique in Europe and probably the world. It is sometimes thankless work, with the failures often talked about, whilst the successes often remain confidential. It is, as yet, under-estimated and under-utilised by those who have most to gain from it.
As in all processes of mediation and conciliation, there are two key words: "trust" and "respect". The Commission takes encouragement from the evidence that trust is being built, slowly, even in areas where hitherto it was almost unthinkable. That in turn is leading to a greater readiness to consider engagement and the Commission will continue to look to its Authorised Officers to make a difference in those areas where little has changed hitherto.