Back on the Garvaghy Road, people are wary and rather worried
We are back on the Garvaghy Road again. People who live there and in the vicinity are wary and rather worried. What the ultimate fallout will be is unpredictable. Things have been said at political level that may be hard to retreat from and that could threaten the stability of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly, and undermine some of what was achieved by the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Here at local level, it is not like the 1990s but there is fear of the unexpected, that some crazy or maverick action could make a bad situation infinitely worse. The formal opposition to the Orange Order parade is being led by the likes of Breandán Mac Cionnaith and the residents’ coalition and Sinn Féin, with some well-known dissidents such as Colin Duffy regularly in attendance. The Orangemen ’s legal representative Jamie Bryson and local DUP MP Carla Lockhart respectively characterised nationalists protesting against the parade as a mob and a rabble. Most local people not directly linked to the protests are reluctant to talk but some are prepared to venture their opinions anonymously. Paul, a 62-year-old local man, says the community is “pulling well together”. “To let the town go back 30 years is ridiculous, but that’s the way it is here,” he says. He thought Alliance leader Naomi Long had a good idea when she suggested the Orangemen should exhibit their Christian credentials by adopting the high moral ground in having won permission to parade but then agreeing not to do so. “They could take the big win in the interests of community relations,” he adds, but, shaking his head, doesn’t think it will happen. “That’s just the way they are.” He remembers the bad times and says he can’t understand how the Parades Commission arrived at its decision to permit the parade . “We don’t want any violence but if the parade is forced down, that would change things. It would bring the youngsters out, and they are easily led. I think there would be a few petrol bombs and the like of that. “We don’t want to go back to that. We all thought that those days were long gone.” Over recent days there has been talk of a possible “one and done” solution whereby a small group of Orangemen would get their parade along the Garvaghy Road but that there would be no more such parades. Paul has his doubts over whether that would work. “I can’t see what the resolution can be. They want to walk, we don’t want them to walk. There is no middle ground. It’s the old Mexican stand-off, it’s about who blinks first but nobody is planning to blink here.” He agrees there is no comparison with the 1990s but adds: “That could change.” Paul is not enamoured of Jamie Bryson. “Jamie can start an argument and then get out of the way,” he says. “He has no connections to Portadown. It is strange he is the Orangemen’s legal adviser.” There is a similar comment from a middle-aged local woman walking near the community centre. “Jamie Bryson and Carla Lockhart have a lot to answer for,” she says. Asked about the mood of the place, she responds: “What is the word you are looking for when you don’t know what it is?” Then she quickly fires out a few: “It’s uneasy, it’s anxious, it’s worried; it’s like Groundhog Day. We don’t know what’s going to happen.” Who is Jamie Bryson, the unelected loyalist standing ‘front, back and centre’ at Drumcree? Her friend, a young woman, adds: “My 12-year-old daughter, every Saturday she goes into the town centre, but I can’t let her any more. Before she could go into town wearing her Donegal or Kerry GAA jersey without any bother, but not now. Whenever she goes out now she is afraid.” Remembering Robert Hamill, a 25-year-old Catholic beaten to death in Portadown at the height of the Drumcree violence almost 30 years ago, the woman adds: “I worry what might happen to her.” She says reactivating Drumcree has caused real trauma: “Every time my dad starts thinking about it, he cries.” The middle-aged woman says her son is married to a local Presbyterian and the couple have three children: “They don’t want this; this has put back community relations.” Observing parents going to collect their young children from school, she adds: “The youngsters, they don’t know what is happening, but they know something is wrong; they can feel it.” The two women are at one that the parade must not go through. “We were second-class citizens, but we’re not any more,” says the middle-aged woman. Other elements of life have changed since the 1990s. Two African women approach along the road, one of them wheeling a child in a buggy. One of the women cheerfully agrees to talk, but her comment is short. “I have really no idea what this is all about so I am afraid I can’t help you.” Why is the Orange Order so set on Garvaghy Road? The mood among ordinary people here generally is calm. There is a stoicism; there is no great bitterness. The feeling is more despairing than angry with the Orange Order. But there is real concern and apprehension. “I still feel terrified,” says one woman. “I don’t want my children and my grandchildren to have to go through this again.” “The road the Orangemen took to Drumcree is a perfectly good road for them to walk back on; they should take that road back and leave us alone,” says her companion, the two women out for a regular afternoon walk. Just 100 metres from them about 50 men and women are gathered on the road at a makeshift encampment close to a banner declaring “Garvaghy Road Says No”. They operate in shifts, ready at a moment’s notice to mobilise more protesters to block the road should the Orangemen back about a mile away up on Drumcree hill get the go-ahead to march. Tricolours and starry plough flags flutter from lamp-posts along the road. Firmly behind the protest, the first woman says admiringly: “The people, the community here, are absolutely brilliant. We have great support this time.” She fears, however, that if the Orangemen ultimately get their parade that the “whole thing will blow up again”. What “blowing up again” might mean is difficult to predict. The road feels much different from the mid- to late-1990s but the apprehension among ordinary people is palpable. The women are of an age where they have strong memories of the early Drumcrees. They do not want a rerun. But that determination to march is going nowhere. Alistair Power, the deputy district master of the Portadown district of the Orange Order, insists: “It is the Orange Order’s legal right to march down the Garvaghy Road. We will continue our campaign. The permission granted by the Parades Commission remains live. We have told police we are ready to walk down the Garvaghy Road when the PSNI is ready to facilitate it.” Rank-and-file Orangemen will not engage with the press outside the Orange hall next to the Church of Ireland, though there is much mention of “British subjects being blocked from the King’s highway”, and sometimes a few mentions of the “Queen’s highway”. “We will be here until we are allowed to go down,” one told a small group of journalists, before walking off. Jamie Bryson, meanwhile, is adamant that there will be no compromise: “The Portadown District will not be doing any deal which doesn’t deliver on the fundamental legal principle, and the fundamental legal principle is this: that the Portadown District will walk the Garvaghy Road and nothing else will do.” The first eruption was on Sunday July 9th, 1995 when locals, with former IRA prisoner Breandán Mac Cionnaith first coming to public prominence as leader of the residents’ group, decided there should be no march. Reluctant Garvaghy Road resistance point man Breandán Mac Cionnaith rises to Drumcree challenge The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) blocked the return parade at the bridge close to the church, and the first of numerous stand-offs began. Rallies on the hill were thunderously addressed by the likes of DUP leader Ian Paisley, the then local Ulster Unionist MP David Trimble, and future DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson. Orange and loyalist blood was up and on the second night, they broke through the police lines, with Ian Paisley, for a time, at their vanguard. Pitched battles were fought in the fields close to the church between, on one side, the police, and on the other, loyalists and Orangemen. Several plastic bullets were fired – I still have a casing from one of the bullets that sits as a pen holder in my office. For a period it seemed the mob would rampage through the Garvaghy area. I remember terrified women in the houses at the Ballyoran estate off the Garvaghy Road saying, incongruously, “thank God for the RUC”. Eventually the protesters were pushed back. Amid the tumult, several groups, from professional mediators and politicians to clergy and representatives of the Orangemen and residents, engaged in various forms of talks. Eventually a compromise was reached where the Orangemen silently marched down the road, with placard-carrying nationalists standing equally quietly on the footpaths. It was strange and eerie, many nationalists turning their backs as the Orangemen passed by. It seemed like an honourable resolution but then, as most nationalists saw it, Paisley and Trimble did their giddy hand-in-hand jig of triumphalism when they reached the Portadown town centre. That ended the brief feelgood factor. Trimble added insult to injury by insisting there was no compromise with the residents when the police, the mediators, the residents and even some members of his own party agreed that a formal accommodation had been reached. Drumcree: ‘I want to stop all this in its tracks. I have five grandchildren; it’s breaking my heart’ There would be no more accommodations. Such was the loyalist and Orange threat that the parades were forced through the Garvaghy Road in 1996 and 1997. The leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) known as King Rat, Billy Wright, later murdered in prison by the INLA, was on the scene, menacing, marshalling and managing his troops. In 2000 Ulster Defence Association figure Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair arrived with about 100 UDA members plus his dog Rebel, they and the dog wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Simply the Best”. Drumcree-related violence and disruption spread throughout the North. At times such was the toxicity it seemed Northern Ireland was on the verge of civil insurrection. The killings began. During the 1996 dispute the LVF murdered Michael McGoldrick, a 31-year-old married Catholic taxi driver from Lurgan, Co Armagh who had just graduated from Queen’s University Belfast with plans to become a teacher. In April the following year amid deep sectarian tensions a loyalist group beat Robert Hamill to death in Portadown town centre. In all, 21 deaths have been linked directly or indirectly to the Drumcree stand-offs. Over the years several other parading disputes arose in places such as Derry, the lower Ormeau area of south Belfast, at the Ardoyne shops in north Belfast, in Dunloy and Rasharkin in Co Antrim, in Bellaghy, Co Derry and in other areas. It is only in recent years, to the relief of most people, that parading disputes have dissipated and mostly died down. Drumcree standoff puts a significant achievement of the peace process at risk Unionists accused Sinn Féin of conspiracy to cause trouble, citing how Gerry Adams in 1996 told a private Sinn Féin conference that opposition to Drumcree and other contentious parades did not “happen by accident” and was the sort of issue that needed to be developed and exploited. Then in July 1998, again during the Drumcree stalemate, the three Quinn children, Richard (10), Mark (nine) and Jason (eight) were killed when loyalists petrol-bombed their home in Ballymoney, Co Antrim. It caused such outrage that there would be no more Drumcree parades after that, even though Portadown District continued to press for a march. The protests and troubles continued into the 2000s but gradually these became weekly token gestures, with marching permission always refused until this procedural foul-up by the Parades Commission resurrected a problem most people thought was settled. Drumcree, 2026: ‘It’s mad they want to go down the road and start all this again’ In the Assembly this week, the new leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, Jon Burrows, who was sure the police would never act to force through an Orange parade, remembered a happier time pertaining to Drumcree. He recalled how as a former senior PSNI officer in the Portadown area members of the Orange Order walked up to the police line every Sunday at Drumcree knowing that under the Parades Commission rulings they would be denied permission to march along the Garvaghy Road. “They would stop at that line not because there was a line of police or there were barricades – the sergeant was often late to turn up – but because the law said, ‘Stop’. In fact, they often rang the police and said, ‘You need to hurry up and get here because we’re at our point and want to hand over a letter’.” Everyone along the Garvaghy Road and most people in Northern Ireland including many unionists, would love that relaxed peaceful situation to return. - Additional reporting Mark Hennessy