Garvaghy Road Says: No Going Back

Por Sean Waters — Tribune

After a three-decade absence of Orange feet on Portadown’s Garvaghy Road, the once historic dispute at Drumcree has reignited. On 25 September, the Parades Commission gave members of the Orange Order permission to march down the predominantly Catholic street — reviving an old display of sectarian force, and triggering a standoff that saw thousands mobilise to defend the local community.This backwards strain of political unionism, whose supremacy was once upheld by the British state, has now been forced to recognise that its power is on the wane. Last week the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Chris Bryant, ordered cancellation of the march, reflecting Orangeism’s diminished influence in Whitehall, the six counties and Portadown itself — once considered an Orange Citadel.But despite the euphoria that followed the decision, it’s clear that deep scars have been reopened. Speaking to Tribune at the Garvaghy Road, one woman described witnessing the beatings her parents, aunts and uncles received at the hands of the Royal Ulster Constabulary the last time the Orangemen paraded down their road in the 1990s. Politicians like the DUP’s Carla Lockhart told residents to ‘regulate their emotions’ at the planned Orange presence, ordering a community to wash away its anger at an orchestrated campaign of murder waged against them, which between 1996 and 1999 alone saw 21 people killed in a ruthless effort to silence opposition to the parade. The most infamous of these horrors, never far from the lips of residents, was the brutal murder of the Quinn children: three Irish boys, aged eight, nine and ten, burned alive in their family home by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. Another victim was the solicitor Rosemary Nelson. An inquiry into her murder concluded that the abuse she received from RUC members legitimised her as a target for paramilitaries; that leaked police intelligence increased the danger to her life; and that despite her life being in danger, the RUC failed to provide her with protection. After Nelson’s murder, an Orange Hall held a celebration. Nelson’s daughter-in-law, Councillor Catherine Nelson, told me that when her husband was a child, he would see his mother come home ‘battered and bruised’ — looking ‘frightened but determined’. Now, to now see his wife on the same road, she said, ‘made him worry about me, it triggered those memories’. Linda O’Neill, a ‘first-generation’ Garvaghy resident who works at the community centre and is a member of the Garvaghy Road Residents Association, described how Drumcree sits within a longer history of anti-Catholic pogroms. Her parents had been driven from another part of Portadown in their youth, and she had grown up knowing of other families burned out of their homes by gangs of armed men, sometimes aided by the police. To Linda, the Garvaghy Road was developed as a ‘ghetto’ for ‘Catholics who couldn’t get houses anywhere else’. There has always been a close connection between the Orange marches and violence, she said. Many years ago she saw the paramilitary killer Billy Wright, known as ‘King Rat’, holding a gun to her friend’s head and saying, ‘You’re only alive because I need you to send a message. The Orange Order’s coming down the road.’Louth TD Ruairí Ó Murchú told Tribune that a sectarian march with such a violent history, staged in a community that does not want it, ‘wouldn’t be accepted anywhere else in the Western world’. The fragile political ecology in the North of Ireland has long been uniquely generous to the Orange Order — a group that bans Catholic members and prohibits its ‘brethren’ from marrying Catholics or attending Catholic weddings and funerals. Residents take an attitude of disinterest towards the dozens of other Orange marches in Portadown, content to ignore what is not rubbed in their faces. For all the ultimata placed on Drumcree in the year to March 2026, there were 2,507 unionist marches across the six counties, 26 times the number of republican marches. Only 1.5 percent faced restrictions on their route. As one woman put it: ‘They only fixate on this one small strip of land because someone told them they couldn’t march through a nationalist area.’Locals who spoke to Tribune were resolute in their refusal to let their pain fester into anything resembling sectarianism. There is no interest in replacing orange supremacy with its green equivalent. There is simply the reasonable demand to ‘live in peace in our own community without being intimidated’. Whatever the future holds, Garvaghy Road knows, after the outpouring of support from across the island of Ireland and indeed around the world, that it will never stand alone.Nor should the most extreme end of loyalism be allowed to declare itself the singular voice of the wider Protestant community. The demonstrations backing the march were tragic affairs and relied on AI to artificially bolster dwindling crowds. The Belfast Telegraph reported that ‘many senior unionists and even some top Orangemen will have been quietly delighted’ at Bryant’s intervention. An open letter signed by well over a thousand Protestants stood behind the Garvaghy Road residents. In the aftermath of such an exhausting struggle, Linda stressed, ‘all Protestant people who have attended our Community Centre for years know that this door will always be open to them.’For the DUP, the dispute is a useful distraction. The party has spiralled into a self-inflicted crisis over its support for Brexit — an event that predictably opened up new possibilities for Irish unity — and has failed to articulate any positive vision for Irish life inside of the United Kingdom. It hopes that beating the sectarian drum will also divert from the imminent sentencing of its former leader Jeffrey Donaldson, recently found guilty on eighteen counts of child sexual abuse. Amid the crisis of unionism, its most extreme fringes have risen in prominence, with unelected figures like Jamie Bryson, an alleged spokesperson for loyalist paramilitaries, coming to the fore. He and his like offer direction — albeit reactionary and sectarian — for a rudderless ship. This is a disciplined and, as the legal battles over Drumcree suggest, well-resourced tendency that is filling the vacuum left by the DUP. The Garvaghy Road dispute is downstream from Bryson’s strategy. He claimed this week that the Orange Order would now march ‘all of those traditional routes again’, signalling his intention to replicate the standoff elsewhere and generate a culture war over previously settled parade routes. Alongside wider attempts to target the Irish Sea border and the promotion of the Irish language, Bryson represents a project to drag the North backwards. He has plainly stated his goal on X: ‘Pull Stormont Down’.The DUP now faces a dilemma. If it charts a different, more moderate course to Bryson, it risks opening up space on its right flank to Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice (who called for Garvaghy Road to be ‘sanitized’). This would require leadership the DUP has not demonstrated and political authority it no longer wields. The alternative is climbing into the passenger seat and letting Bryson drive unionism toward a trajectory that would rob the DUP of the authority it derives from its place on Northern Ireland’s Executive. Trying to play by Bryson’s rules is already backfiring for the DUP. They recently made a failed attempt to pass a vote of no confidence in the Sinn Féin First Minister Michelle O’Neill over her support for the Garvaghy Road community. Bryson dismissed the move as theatrics and demanded the party withdraw entirely from the power-sharing government. The politics of the lowest common denominator rarely pays off. As tensions simmer, Sinn Féin’s National Chairperson Declan Kearney has called on the British left to ‘rally once more in defence of the Irish peace process. To stand with us in support of equality, democracy and Irish unity.’ Kearney insisted to Tribune that the Good Friday Agreement ‘is a peace settlement, not a political settlement’, and that it cannot be taken for granted. As this historic achievement built on the principle of equality comes under increasing strain from reactionary forces, we must respond with one voice: There is No Going Back.

Fonte: Tribune