Braid District Twelfth: 16 pictures from Broughshane parade as TUV leader Jim Allister urges unionism to ‘get back to basics’

Lodges participating in the demonstration were Buckna, Pollee, Broughshane, Teenies, Jamison’s Trues Blues (Skerry), Aughafatten, Glenarm, Carnlough, Cairnalbana, Lisnamurrican and Ballygelly.

The parade started at the Commons, Tullymore Road and made its way to the demonstration field at the corner of Buckna Road and Rathkeel Road.

Platform speakers were TUV leader Jim Allister and Grand Chaplain Rev. David Reid, of Ardstraw Presbyterian Church.

In his speech, Mr Allister warned that a ‘sticking plaster’ will never mend what he called “our fractured Union with GB’ and urged unionism to ‘return to basics’.

"What was the core demand of our forefathers when faced with the treachery of the Home Rule Crisis? You find that core demand at the very hear of the Ulster Covenant of 1912 - it was the simple but irrefutable demand for “equal citizenship” within the United Kingdom,” he told those gathered in the field.

"That is the bedrock to which unionism should return. The demand for equal citizenship is unanswerable. To demand to be ruled, as in GB, exclusively by British laws, to be subject to the jurisdiction of British courts, to have restored equality in trade, to have the Acts of Union defining our constitutional alignment - these are all basic and undeniable demands.

"So,my message to unionism today is get back to the basics of what makes us unionists and hold tenaciously to those demands - it is the only route to constitutional certainty and security. ‘One Crown, One Parliament, One People’ remains the essence of the Union and is what we need.”