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The Orange Order has been blocked from marching on Portadown’s Garvaghy Road since 1998. Locals fear a new parade will open old wounds
The Orange Order has been blocked from marching on Portadown’s Garvaghy Road since 1998. Locals fear a new parade will open old woundsSunflowers grow outside the whitewashed building where children’s scooters are abandoned beside wooden swings on a grassy play area.town that became a hub for residents living in the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road area at the height of a dispute over anThe firefighters of 9/11: They were eating breakfast when the call came.
‘They all left’Westport Estate’s CEO on its two-year closure: ‘There’s a lot of money being spent here’ But a fresh application by the Portadown District of the Orange Order for a silent, “limited” procession along the Garvaghy Road at the end of this month has reignited tensions. More than 100 residents packed out the centre’s main hall to support a petition against the march the previous evening.
“It’s hard to put into words the anxiety and fear this has created across generations,” says Linda O’Neill, the centre’s manager. Garvaghy Road in Portadown where the Orange Order wants to hold a parade, against the wishes of many who live in the area. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd/The Irish Times“Some older people have said they’ll not get the bus up the town or will cancel their doctor’s appointment until this all settles down. That worries me,” says O’Neill.
“We have a young volunteer who is a fantastic wee footballer. He plays for a team that is mostly Protestant and he turned round last night and said: ‘Am I going to have to stop playing? ’ He’s 16. He has friends and a life outside of here.
” O’Neill has worked at the centre for almost 30 years and grew up on the Garvaghy Road, an epicentre of sectarian tensions during Northern Ireland’s Troubles. When she was a teenager, she recalls going into Portadown town centre where some shops displayed job signs with “Catholics need not apply”.
“I’m not talking about the 1950s. I’m talking about the 1990s. Those businesses are now gone. We’ve moved on.
We’ve had 28 years of peace,” she says.
“Anybody that hasn’t been here and lived it does not respect the trauma, the intergenerational trauma that is here. ”She received hate mail the night before we meet.
“I haven’t said anything derogatory about Protestant people or the unionist community. What I’m talking about is this specific parade. For me, it is a sectarian march. ” In the middle of the room, copies of the petition are stacked; it will be translated into other languages including Portuguese and Polish to reflect the town’s changing demographic.
Nuala Halfpenny: 'The consequence will be about relationships.
' Photograph: Enda O'Dowd/The Irish Times“It’s getting too real,” she says.come too far in 28 years. I don’t think there’ll be violence as a consequence. The consequence will be about relationships. ”If successful in their bid, it will be the first time Orangemen have marched the contentious route on their return leg from Drumcree Church in 28 years.
“I’m waking every morning with anxiety. I feel physically sick at the thought of it,” says Maxine Cusack. Maxine Cusack in her home just off the Garvaghy Road.
'I don’t think the trauma at the time had as big impact as now. ' Photograph: Enda O'Dowd/The Irish Times Pouring cups of tea from an enormous silver teapot, the 64-year-old lives off the Garvaghy Road and is worried she will have to “shelter my grandchildren” from potential trouble. Cusack was among the residents barricaded in by armoured RUC vehicles and British soldiers amid the massive security operation during the summers of the late 1990s.
RUC officers in riot gear and armed British soldiers face Orangemen and their supporters at Drumcree church during the parade standoff in 1998. Photograph: Joe St Leger The Drumcree protest began in 1995 with images of violent clashes beamed around the world. The dispute ended in 1998 after three Catholic children – Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn – were killed in a petrol-bomb attack on their Co Antrim home.
They were among 21 sectarian murders linked to the dispute between 1996 and 1999.think it’s worse when you’re looking at it again,” says Cusack.
“I had three children under the age of eight and I moved them out during those summers to a caravan in Warrenpoint with my sister. Now I have a son in a mixed marriage. Clockwise from front left; Jason , Mark and Richard Quinn, who were killed in a petrol-bomb attack on their home in Ballymoney, Co Antrim, at the height of the Drumcree dispute in July 1998, with their brother Lee, who survived.
Photograph: PA“I’m driving round the town seeing young girls mixing with kids their age from other communities ... it’s totally different from my day. ”Yet the Tricolours that once flew from lamp-posts along the Garvaghy Road during the stand-off have disappeared. Today, two newly erected home-made flags emblazoned with images of Orangemen are attached to railings at the end of the road close to the junction of Drumcree Road.
Drumcree Parish Church, just outside Portadown, where the Orange Order wants to march later this month for the first time in 28 years. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd/The Irish TimesBanners on Garvaghy Road, Portadown, this week. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd/The Irish TimesPortadown Orange hall, near Garvaghy Road. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd/The Irish Times “Orange Feet off our Street,” one reads.
“Re-route” is daubed in white paint on the other. Underneath it says: “No talk, no walk. ” One of the most striking changes in the area is the increase in new housing developments off the Garvaghy Road over the past 25 years.
“This was all rose fields back in the 60s,” says Breandán Mac Cionnaith as we drive past Rose Cottages. “These are brand new estates off this road, off the Dungannon Road and the Drumcree Road that weren’t there the last time the Orange Order marched. ”“The amount of housing that’s here since Drumcree is unbelievable.
If a march was pushed through without the consent of the people living here, all those areas would have to be sealed off to stop anybody getting out. ” He rushes to meet The Irish Times in his office on the Garvaghy Road, saying he “couldn’t get up the road”.
“I tell them, ‘I hope not’. There’s no justification for a parade. ” Breandán Mac Cionnaith has been the public face of Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition for three decades. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd/The Irish Times In its notification to the Northern Ireland Parades Commission, the Orange Order said it would hold a “dignified and non-triumphalist” procession without bands on Sunday, September 27th.
Instead of 400 members and two bands, the parade will be scaled back to “60 persons wearing collarettes and no other regalia”. In a press conference following the announcement of its plans earlier this month, Portadown District Master Nigel Dawson rejected suggestions that their rights were more important than the rights of Garvaghy Road residents.
Orange Order Portadown District master Nigel Dawson with, from left, DUP MLA Jonathan Buckley, loyalist activist Jamie Bryson, the Orange Order's Alastair Power, DUP MP Carla Lockhart and TUV MP Jim Allister at a press conference on September 3rd. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PAThere will be no threat of violence or disruption from “any section of our community” regardless of the outcome of the application, he said.
“More than 800 men in this district all live and work in this town ... So we’re very much not competing on rights,” Dawson told reporters “We’re very much competing on shared space, equality, respect, tolerance, that our culture, our heritage, is as important as everybody else’s – and theirs is important too. We recognise that.
The re-emergence of the old Troubles-era dispute was sparked by a scathing legal ruling against the Northern Ireland Parades Commission last month which resulted in a judge quashing its most recent determination to ban the parade along the nationalist route. The commission, which adjudicates on contentious parades across the North, was set up by the UK government as a direct result of Drumcree.
Commissioners are expected to announce their decision on the latest application four days before the proposed September 27th parade. Last Friday it emerged the commission is seeking to appoint an independent mediator to facilitate talks aimed at breaking the near 30-year standoff. Mac Cionnaith is preparing to contact the body before 5pm on Tuesday; he will not be drawn on whether they will take part in the mediation.
“There will be a number of questions that will arise but that’s between ourselves and the Parades Commission,” he says. “We want to know the background and qualifications of this mediator – and if they have ever done anything for the British government. ”Portadown District Lodge has agreed to participate in mediation.
“It was complete and utter fear for many families during that period in the 90s,” he says. “If you take it, those people who were preschool/primary school age 28 years ago; they’re now the parents of young kids themselves. They saw what their parents had to go through. And they don’t want their children having to see the same.
”In the Drumcree Community Centre, a young woman arrives on Tuesday afternoon. Dressed in a striped twin-set, her face flushes with embarrassment when asked for her reaction to the Orange Order proposal.
“I work in a place where it’s all Protestant, I’m the only Catholic so I can’t give you my name,” says the 25-year-old. “But I think it’s mad. The fact they want to go down the road and start all this again, I don’t understand. You see videos from the time on social media, it’s awful.
“When I was growing up, I was friends with everybody. It was never like, ‘you’re a Protestant and I’m not going to talk to you’.
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