A plan to replace the Parades Commission in the North would see top leaders handle marches, writes Fionnula O'Connor
THE STRETCH of housing leading away from the town centre is pleasant in the sunshine. Modest, middling, and then posh new buildings spread up the slope of road to a more ambitious housing development where town meets countryside. A mile away, between whitethorn-laden hedges, is a graceful small church. As outskirts of towns go, this is a pretty place.
Garvaghy Road, Drumcree church, and Portadown all look very different from a few years ago, when their names stood for an annual upsurge of disorder, a contagion of murderous bitterness throughout the North that threatened the emerging peace.
This Saturday, an annual "Junior Orange" march is due to take place near the bottom of Garvaghy. Once that too brought clashes, heralding July's storms. Better policing and laborious contacts between community workers have defused dread of the junior march, but the crucial factor is the pacification of Drumcree. The only worry is that political horse-trading might risk revisiting the past.
Orange marchers last paraded from Drumcree down the Garvaghy Road in July 1997, while soldiers and police cleared angry Catholics from their path.
The years before and after were full of discord. But for several years now, Orangemen have made only a ritual protest outside the church, and then dispersed quietly.
Their complaint is that the Parades Commission say they may not "walk home" past Garvaghy's Catholic houses after their annual church service. Long ago, many outsiders became bored by all this. When the Orangemen use another road to get to Drumcree, why do they so badly need to parade home along Garvaghy?
Even inside Northern Ireland, some may never have realised that the Drumcree march is only one of dozens through Portadown during each lengthy marching season. This was never the last parade left to Orangemen, humiliated by vindictive Catholics at the instigation of Sinn Féin.
When the Drumcree row escalated, there were almost 30 annual Portadown marches by the various "loyal orders". But up close, the route's appeal is clear - it denies Catholics a veto on marches. The "traditional route" along Garvaghy is nothing of the sort.
Once the route represented defeat, though this was only a shadow of the Drumcree disaster to come. Once, "the Orange" walked where it chose, protected by police and soldiers in parades past hemmed-in, humiliated Catholics.
Since the order's formation 200 years ago, marches brought violence in Portadown, as they did elsewhere.
The parade lost in 1997 was a substitute for another, always controversial one, through an older district, and rerouted after 1985's Anglo-Irish Agreement. To avert nagging from the Dublin government of the day, and to stake a claim to new impartiality, the RUC began to divert Orangemen from the shabby "Tunnel" to Garvaghy Road, then still half-rural, and mixed.
But Catholics in majority-Protestant Portadown had been clustering on the outskirts of the town for security reasons from the early Troubles onward.
The IRA did ugly things in mid-Armagh - so did loyalists, under paramilitary flags and without them. Garvaghy Road became an almost totally Catholic town within a town, complete with class divides.
It did not require Sinn Féin to organise opposition against the Orange in Portadown, or elsewhere, though republicans took any credit going.
The best-known Garvaghy spokesman, Breandán MacCionnaith, an IRA ex-prisoner, eventually became an SF representative and paid adviser to the local MLA in Stormont. An easy target for unionist resentment, he was a community organiser before election, and still is. He is discreet, but the suspicion is that like others he fears a Sinn Féin-DUP deal to allow at least one more march down Garvaghy.
Today's air of prosperity on the road may not blow equally upon all, but all would agree that it post-dates the last Drumcree. No unionist will admit it publicly, but few in Portadown would turn back the clock.
The loyalist killings of Michael McGoldrick, Bernadette Martin, Robert Hamill and Rosemary Nelson sickened many in both communities. The Orange Order lost face, and members, with each ugly confrontation, pleaded for peace.
Drumcree may be unresolved, but it is a peaceable stalemate.
Now, a proposal would replace the Parades Commission, which had stopped Drumcree and defused the issue of marching generally. Local councils, and the First and Deputy First Ministers, in the last resort, would handle parades. An independent body would be replaced by political hard-scrabble; many Portadown unionist councillors are Orangemen. Drumcree and Ormeau Road, another former arena of conflict, have been reserved for more consideration as "legacy cases". But the drift is unsettling.
The idea is to be polished up for a final report in autumn by a group headed by Paddy Ashdown, former politician and soldier. It includes a senior ex-IRA man. The suggestion is that the commission would only disappear when unionists share responsibility for policing with republicans.
A step towards reconciliation? A less highflown interpretation has the DUP winning a propaganda victory in return for a logical development, but with Sinn Féin offering a deal they will struggle to deliver.