Twenty eight years after the last stand-off at Drumcree, near Portadown town in County Armagh, the local Orange Order is attempting to march down the predominantly Catholic/nationalist Garvaghy Road as local residents block their path.
Many Garvaghy Road residents have reacted with shock and anger, recalling the 1990s when the disputed parade meant days of confinement under heavy police and British Army presence.
Frank, a Garvaghy resident and Militant Left activist, said: “People were really shocked by the Parades Commission ruling. It brought back memories of terrible times. It’s been a very tense atmosphere on the road, and in the Portadown area since then”.
During the 1990s, the annual Drumcree stand-offs brought widespread blockades, riots and sectarian intimidation, and scores were killed, including the three young Quinn brothers in a sectarian arson attack in Ballymoney. Public revulsion helped pull society back from the brink.
A few weeks later, the Omagh bomb, attributed to the Real IRA, killed 29 people. For most people, the atrocity underscored the yearning to end the ‘Troubles’ and helped the Establishment consolidate the peace process and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Working‑class people across the North, Catholic and Protestant alike, have no wish to return to those dark days.
Drumcree flared again after a legal challenge overturned earlier procedural rulings, allowing a restricted Orange Order parade down the Garvaghy Road for the first time since 1998. A High Court injunction blocked the move, was upheld, then dramatically reversed in a late‑night appeal. Residents and nationalist politicians responded with a mass blockade to stop the march.
Although the Orange march is limited to 35 marchers walking in silence, the residents of Garvaghy Road retain every right to oppose a parade through their community. They view it as a sectarian provocation, especially given that no such marches have occurred there for almost three decades.
While the Orange Order is a reactionary, sectarian organisation, its members have a right to march. Indeed, they conduct thousands of parades throughout the North annually, most of which take place without objection. Equally, local residents maintain the right to object to offensive marches and to be free from being trapped inside their homes under virtual curfew.
Sinn Féin and the DUP have both appeared at Drumcree in recent days, on opposite sides, even though they jointly run the Stormont Executive and have failed to deliver on health, education, housing and wages. With Stormont already under strain and an election looming next May, both parties are aiming to shore up support.
The widely discredited Parades Commission – an unelected quango which decides who can
walk where – has once again shown itself to be a barrier to genuine negotiation, not a facilitator of it. The CWI in Ireland opposed the Parades Commission from the outset, warning that an unelected body serving the capitalist state could not act as a genuine arbiter and that laws aimed at curbing sectarian parades would eventually be used against workers. Recently striking Pilgrims workers in Enniskillen had their names taken by the police and were told their picket was an illegal procession under the Public Processions (Northern Ireland) Act 1998.
The Orange Order has said it is willing to engage with residents and the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition has called for an international facilitator to be brought in to try to resolve the dispute. Both organisations are also talking with the Secretary of State and various ‘mediation processes’ and possible ‘march compromises’ are in the air.
The decision over who can walk down cannot be left in the hands of unelected quangos, judges and pro-capitalist governments rather than in the hands of the communities affected. The only way out of this stand-off is through face-to-face meetings and genuine negotiation not through legal rulings and police blockades.
All the parties involved will feel, to one degree or another, the strong desire from the broader community, from working-class people on both sides, to reach an agreement and to not allow the situation to engulf society as it did in the 1990s.
Local community organisations, alongside trade union workplace representatives from the Portadown area, backed up by the wider union movement, can take initiatives to cut across sectarian tensions and intimidation.
Garvaghy resident and Militant Left activist, Frank, comments: “I have been calling for workers’ unity but only about 10% of people are listening at the moment.
As time goes by that will change. People know we can’t rely on the government or establishment politicians; any long-term solution has to come from working class people, Protestant and Catholic, agreeing the way forward.”
The task of socialists is to build a united working-class movement that transcends sectarianism and challenges the capitalist system that thrives on division.