After 12 days of massive and often violent protest, the Portadown Lodge of the Orange Order has given up all hope of forcing its walk down the Garvaghy Road.
Signalling the end to mass protest in the Drumcree stand-off, the Portadown District Master, Mr Harold Gracey, conceded that the Order's battle to parade down the Garvaghy Road was "not going to be won in Drumcree".
"We don't need 30,000 people on that hill," Mr Gracey told an Orange Order rally in the centre of Portadown last night, "as long as there are a few people there."
However, Mr Gracey, who was greeted with loud cheers by a crowd of several thousand, said the Order's campaign would continue for as long as necessary. He called for a massive campaign of passive resistance. A further rally is planned for Belfast today.
Only a token presence will be maintained by Portadown Orangemen at Drumcree, which remained sealed off yesterday as the RUC continued its search for weapons and bomb-making material.
Proximity talks between the Orange Order in Co Armagh and Nationalist residents of the Garvaghy Road will resume this morning in Armagh city. The last round of talks broke up a week ago without any agreement. The Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition yesterday welcomed the resumption, but its spokesman, Mr Breandan Mac Cionnaith, said this year's Drumcree parade was "a dead is sue" as far as he was concerned.
It also emerged yesterday death threats have been sent to the three Orange Order chaplains who called for an end to the Drumcree protest, following the killing of the three Quinn children in Ballymoney last weekend. The Grand Orange Lodge said it was "deeply shocked" at the threats.
The spokesman for the Portadown Orange Order, Mr David Jones, said a series of further protests had been planned across Northern Ireland but details would not be revealed in advance.
Asked about finds of explosives and weaponry by the RUC in their search of the Drumcree site, Mr Jones said these could have been left there by republicans.
He put the attendance at last night's rally at 15,000 although most observers, including the RUC, estimated the crowd at about 2,000. Marchers carried banners bearing slogans such as "We haven't gone away, you know" and "The siege of Drumcree has only begun". The attendance included DUP Assembly member, the Rev William McCrea, and Pastor Kenny McClinton, a former loyalist paramilitary who has acted as an intermediary with the Loyalist Volunteer Force.
In his address, Mr Gracey accused the Northern Ireland Office of "black propaganda" in the wake of the murder of the Quinn children. "Shame on them for using the deaths of three young boys to blacken anyone else." It was "actually impossible" to link the killings in Ballymoney to events in Drumcree, he said.
He denied there were splits within the Orange Order although he conceded there were "disagreements and different strategies". The Grand Lodge was fully behind the Orangemen in Portadown, he said.
The Rev Hugh Ross, an Orange Order chaplain from Co Down, told the crowd he disagreed with those chaplains who sought the end of the Drumcree protest. These chaplains were in a minority within the Order, he claimed. Mr Ross said the British government wanted to isolate Orangeism and to achieve the "total absorption of Ulster within Eire". "Our cry is still that of `No surrender'," he said.
