BELGRADE, THURSDAY

LOYALIST ANGER IN Northern Ireland could lead to a billion-pound industry, if a proposal to establish a state of the art bonfire factory in Larne, Co Antrim, comes to fruition, according to experts.

“Craigyhill’s enormous Twelfth of July bonfire has caught the eyes of people across the globe and now cities, towns and communities everywhere are asking if they can have one, too,” explains Professor Idle Doss of the Larne Loyalist Expression Concern, a cross-border-funded organisation that teaches old Loyalist paramilitaries to read and write. “What began as an expression of anger and contempt could turn into the biggest business start-up in Northern Ireland since DeLorean.”

Larne’s Craigyhill bonfire is so big that it is claiming a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

“We’re fast running out of timber for these things,” says Iris Humper-Spleen of Godly Feminists for a United Kingdom, a Loyalist female pressure group. “Remember they have to be strong enough to hold police cars and Irish tricolours and photographs of the Pope and whoever’s Taoiseach down south, and God knows who else, depending on who the latest *Lundy is. Unionism has been on the back foot these past years but the possibility of making our burning season into a multi-million pound business, that is a shot in the arm for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

Eleventh night bonfires, where the pagan-like pyres are set alight strewn in various hate symbols, are the signal for celebrating Protestant victory over Catholics in 1690. “A factory producing them in the thousands would secure that victory for decades, even centuries to come,” Professor Doss said. “Now who could object to that? What an effect it will have on our downtrodden community.”

“For us, the effect is the same as a burning cross in Alabama or Mississippi,” said a Catholic priest whose community prefers to stay at home watching Bridgerton when the bonfires are alight.

*A traitor to the Protestant cause in Northern Ireland – ED