The Drumcree parade was never just about a parade. Not 30 years ago. Not today. Following the weekend’s drama in the courts and on streets and country roads in and around Portadown, the focus of most of the attention will move from there to Belfast, where Northern Ireland Secretary of State Chris Bryant will move centre stage.
The Welsh politician is new to the job, and has come to it believing that he can make a difference. Equally, as he showed just a few weeks ago in Oxford when he spoke to the British-Irish Association, he has come to Belfast with a confidence, even naivete, that most listening to him believed will be, metaphorically, beaten out of him the longer he stays.
For now, Bryant is calling for calm, and for both sides to reason with one another. There is little sign of either.
The Drumcree Residents’ Association will not tolerate a march down the Garvaghy Road - it does not matter the conditions, the number of Orangemen allowed, whether they have bands, or not, the time of day or anything else.
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The memories of 30 years ago are still raw on the Garvaghy Road.
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Equally, the tensions displayed to the world then have not disappeared.
Portadown may not be as bitter a place as it was in the 1990s, but it remains one of the most divided communities in Northern Ireland. The peace process may have brought relative peace to Northern Ireland, but it has brought little harmony to Portadown.
Nevertheless, some context is necessary, too.
On Monday, Portadown is going about its daily business: the shops are open, the local car parks are full. Nobody has been killed, or injured, unlike the dark days of the 1990s.
This is not the mid-1990s: the scenes at Drumcree Church are a pale shadow of 30 years ago, even allowing for the few hundred Orange supporters who arrived at the scene on Sunday evening – something that the Orange Order, which has played a better hand than it did 30 years ago, had managed to avoid.
Direct confrontations, bar a few verbals, between nationalist demonstrators and the Police Service of Northern Ireland were avoided, too, on the Garvaghy Road, though it remains puzzling why the police told the Parades Commission that it believed a Drumcree march could take place without significant public order issues.
If it believed that last week, it cannot believe it now. Local residents’ leader, Breandán Mac Cionnaith – no friend of Sinn Féin, since he broke with them 20 years ago over the party’s decision to back policing – has declared that there will be no retreat, no compromises. “Those f**kers are not going down this road, and that’s it,” as he put it on Sunday.
The real damage this time may not be in Portadown, but in Stormont. Northern Ireland’s Justice Minister, Alliance leader Naomi Long, said the rebirth of the Drumcree crisis had been “deliberately orchestrated” to bring down political institutions in Northern Ireland. More than a few share her thoughts.
“It is my view, rightly or wrongly, that there are those who deliberately orchestrated this conflict in order to ensure that Stormont would be in trouble, who have been opposed to devolution from the outset and who have manipulated this situation to that end,” Long told BBC Radio Ulster on Monday morning.
[ Decades after flashpoints of the 1990s, Drumcree is just as dangerousOpens in new window ]
“Unfortunately I think there is so little commitment now from other parties to continue in Stormont in any meaningful way, that yes it is in trouble.
“I don’t think that that’s new, Stormont is almost permanently in a state of almost collapse. I have concerns as Justice Minister that there is a culture of lawlessness across our society, where if you don’t get the outcome you want, you simply kick back against the law, draw the police into conflict and blame them instead of taking responsibility.”
Neither Sinn Féin nor the Democratic Unionist Party – the two parties that dominate the Assembly and the Executive – have any interest in the success of either, if for different reasons.
The DUP has no interest in powersharing. Sinn Féin, fired by its unity agenda, has little interest in seeing the institutions work.
Yet again, the airwaves heard a chorus of calls for Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, and other senior Sinn Féin leaders to face prosecution for taking part in the Garvaghy Road demonstration, which blocked the roads and had not been notified to the police and Parades Commission as required under 20-year-old legislation.
Clearly, they were involved. Equally clearly, the PSNI will have zero appetite to begin, or at least to finish, any such investigation, though in the febrile world of Northern Irish politics nothing now can ever be entirely ruled out.
The DUP’s calls for prosecution are hypocritical, says Long, especially its call that O’Neill should face sanction under Stormont’s ministerial code where Ministers are supposed to act within the law.
“I would love it to be the case that when Ministers breach the code or behave improperly as MLAs, that they are held to account like they ought to be. That is the standard we should be able to expect. Unfortunately it’s not the standard that has been set by either of the two main parties,” she said, dryly.
Describing Long’s comments as “shameful”, DUP MLA Diane Forsythe said: “If anyone was ever in doubt that the Alliance Party is Sinn Féin’s little buddy, the shameful intervention of Naomi Long on BBC Radio Ulster this morning is all the evidence needed – attack unionists, equivocate on Michelle O’Neill. Same old Alliance.”
Besides the planned meetings on Monday in Belfast between Bryant and the residents, and separately with the political parties in person, or by telephone, there will be a focus on the Orange Order. It had permission to march, and it won that battle in the courts, but the clock has now elapsed on the permission that was granted to it.
Will it file a new application? What will the Parades Commission – a body battered by the humiliation it sustained in court for failing to deal properly with the Order’s first application – do when it receives it? Will the PSNI say again that the march could take place safely, when all the evidence is against that?
Equally, will the courts judge that the Orange Order has been treated unfairly because it was blocked from exercising the permission that it had to march, one granted by no less a court than Northern Ireland’s Court of Appeal, and that those against such marches should not be able to win by playing down the clock?
There is much to play for here, not just in Drumcree, or the Garvaghy Road.
