Portadown protesters disperse after blocking Orange Order march
Community leader Breandán Mac Cionnaith said the Orange Order march would not go ahead overnight, and that a meeting with the Northern Ireland secretary and the PSNI chief constable was planned for that morning.
Thousands of nationalist residents who spent 27 September blocking an Orange Order march along the Garvaghy Road in Portadown mostly went home after midnight, after a community leader said the effort had worked and that talks on the wider parade dispute would follow.
The Orange Order had been granted permission by the courts to march its traditional return route from Drumcree Church along the Garvaghy Road for the first time in almost 30 years. Belfast’s High Court lifted a temporary injunction against the march on the evening of 26 September, and the Court of Appeal upheld that decision in the early hours of 27 September, clearing roughly 35 Orangemen to proceed.
The PSNI did not allow the march to go ahead despite the court ruling, citing public safety, and officers repeatedly warned the crowd on the road that blocking a lawfully permitted parade was an offence. The protesters, who included Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, and the Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald, stayed in place through 27 September.
O’Neill asked the crowd to remain on the road until “12 o’clock tonight at least.” The Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Bryant, met the region’s main political parties that day and told reporters afterwards, “We haven’t got a solution yet.”
Community leader Breandán Mac Cionnaith told the crowd shortly after midnight that they had “stopped them once” and that “the process now is to ensure we stop them permanently.” Mac Cionnaith asked for twenty to thirty volunteers to remain on the road overnight and said commitments had been given that the march would not attempt to pass before morning.
Mac Cionnaith said a meeting with Bryant and the PSNI chief constable, Jon Boutcher, was planned for that morning to discuss the dispute. The Orange Order’s legal permission to use the route, granted by the courts for 27 September, expired at midnight, meaning the Portadown District Loyal Orange Lodge No 1 would need a fresh Parades Commission determination before attempting the march again.
The Garvaghy Road runs through a mostly Catholic area of Portadown and has not seen an Orange Order parade pass along it since the mid-1990s. The Parades Commission, set up under the Belfast Agreement, has consistently rejected the Orange Order’s applications to use the route, and the dispute triggered rioting and roadblocks across Northern Ireland in the years that followed.
The stand-off tested the stability of the Stormont power-sharing executive less than nine months before Northern Ireland’s next assembly election.