The first Orange Order parade authorised to pass along Portadown’s Garvaghy Road since 1998 has been stopped by a nationalist crowd that took over the route at first light, leaving the Orangemen waiting at Drumcree church for most of September 27 and the British Government appealing for restraint.
Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill joined the blockade alongside Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald, hours after the High Court in Belfast refused to overturn the ruling that had cleared the march.
The Parades Commission, the statutory body set up in 1998 to adjudicate on contentious marches, reversed its long-standing determination on September 25. It attached narrow conditions: 35 Orangemen, walking in silence, with no band and no accompanying supporters, and the parade finished by 9.30am.
None of that happened. Police marshalled the lodge shortly before the 8am start and withdrew the authorisation minutes later as the crowd on the road grew into the thousands, according to The Irish Times. Officers had earlier warned over loudspeakers that those blocking the route risked arrest for taking part in an unnotified parade.
Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Chief Constable Jon Boutcher said his officers were handling an “exceptionally challenging situation” and that the operation had so far kept violence and disorder off the streets. Two schools in Portadown said they would close on September 28.
The legal sequence behind the stand-off was compressed into 36 hours. Residents secured a temporary injunction against the commission’s decision on September 26, which was set aside on appeal the same day.
A High Court judge then sat after midnight to hear a final challenge and declined to substitute his own view for that of the commission, which he found had given reasons for its determination. The hearing ended at about 2.15am, some six hours before the parade was due to step off.
That timetable is central to the unionist reading of what followed. Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Gavin Robinson said the outcome was clear and accused nationalist politicians of showing contempt for “the police, the courts and the rule of law”.
Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly, also of the DUP, said nobody in Northern Ireland wanted violence or disorder. Robinson argued that a First Minister’s duty is to uphold lawful decisions rather than to encourage opposition to them.
O’Neill and Sinn Féin rejected that framing. The First Minister called on Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Chris Bryant to intervene and questioned why the commission had chosen, after 28 years, to return the dispute to a nationalist neighbourhood. McDonald described the court’s decision as “disgraceful”. The party asked Bryant to ban the parade outright.
Bryant, who travelled to Belfast, said he was taking the situation very seriously and repeated that “everybody should cooperate with the police”. He declined to say whether O’Neill had placed herself outside the law, though he noted that holders of public office carry a particular duty to lower the temperature.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC: “We do appeal for calm on all sides.” He said the gains made in Northern Ireland should not be reversed.
The Garvaghy Road is the most heavily freighted stretch of tarmac in Northern Ireland’s parading calendar. The Orange Order, the largest Protestant fraternal body in Northern Ireland, claims it as the traditional return route from Drumcree church and has pressed the point for three decades; residents of the mainly Catholic area regard a march through it as a deliberate assertion of dominance.
The stand-offs of the mid-1990s produced some of the worst public disorder of the late Troubles and were among the immediate reasons the Parades Commission was created. The route has been closed to the Order since 1998, the year the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement ended a conflict that had killed more than 3,500 people.
Those agreements built a devolved administration under British sovereignty in which unionists and nationalists share office, with a commitment from London to hold a border poll when it judges that a majority for change exists. The offices held by O’Neill and Little-Pengelly are joint and equal, which is why a First Minister on a protest line against a court-backed determination carries constitutional weight beyond Portadown.
The Irish Government said it was deeply concerned and that its priority was to prevent a return to the divisions of the past, invoking the reconciliation built under the 1998 accord, RTÉ reported. Dublin is a co-guarantor of the agreement and has standing to raise the matter with London directly.
The EU is not a party to the settlement but has underwritten it financially for more than 30 years. The PEACEPLUS programme for 2021-2027, worth about €1 billion, is funded principally by the EU and delivered across Northern Ireland and the Irish border counties, and the stability of the devolved institutions remains a working assumption of EU-UK relations under the Windsor Framework.
Catholic Archbishop Eamon Martin and Church of Ireland Archbishop John McDowell issued a joint appeal for an inclusive initiative to find a way through the impasse, warning that “too much is at stake”.
The Orange Order said late on September 27 that it remained determined to complete the walk. Residents said they had stopped it and intended to keep doing so.
