Garvaghy Road - threats and stalling
By Ned Kelly
With 38 days left until Drumcree Saturday, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams
has calling for support for the nationalist residents of the Garvaghy Road.
Following discussions with the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition (GRRC),
both Adams and SDLP leader John Hume have issued statements to highlight
the nationalist consensus on the Orange siege.
Adams called for ``an immediate end to the daily intimidation of this
community by the Orange Order and its supporters''.
He said: ``The Good Friday Agreement was designed to bring about fundamental
and thoroughgoing change in peoples lives. The key issue is one of human
and civil rights. These rights are not negotiable.''
Reassuring Garvaghy residents that they will not be victims to political
expediency, Adams added: ``The plight of the residents is a stand-alone
issue and cannot be traded off, as some media speculation has suggested,
for an Executive or other political development.''
The call comes following three days of orchestrated loyalist violence last
week, after the GRRC's challenge to the latest Parades Commission ruling
that an Orange parade that left several nationalists injured last year can
go ahead, and as evidence mounts that Orange supporters are preparing for
an all-or-nothing confrontation this summer.
DUP Assembly member and Orange Order member Paul Berry looks set to face
legal proceedings over his clear threat that along with `others' he was
prepared to ``take the law into our own hands''. In a BBC interview, Berry
issued the threat which, according to legal advice taken by the GRRC, is
sufficient for him to be prosecuted. Berry could be charged by the RUC
under the 1997 Protection from Harassment Order that is designed to protect
individuals from stalkers, wife-batterers and perverts. Although he may
also be open to charges of incitement.
In the BBC interview Berry said: ``They've stopped us going along the
Garvaghy Road and they're going to try and stop us in Corcrain. But I will
say quite clearly they'll not be stopping us this July, because if our
security forces and government do not take the right decision, well then
we're going to have to think very seriously of what way we're going to go
down this road in 1999.
``And if that is a matter of taking the law into our own hands, we're going
to have to do that.''
Interviewer: ``That sounds like a threat.''
Berry: ``Well that is a threat.''
Meanwhile, the Portadown Orange Order has attempted to erect preconditions
to next week's three-day proximity talks, chaired by ACAS negotiator Frank
Blair, by calling for clarification. On Wednesday afternoon, the Portadown
Orange lodge said it was willing to take part in the latest round of
proximity talks but demanded clarification on specific issues. Earlier in
the week, leading Portadown Orangeman David McNarry attempted to dictate
terms to the Garvaghy Road residents. He said that if Breandán MacCionnaith
was not part of the negotiating team and that if the Garvaghy Road
residents withdrew their objections to the Orange parade through their
community from the Parades Commission, then he could see no problems in
talking. Meanwhile the 30 June Orange-imposed deadline for finding a
solution to the situation remains.
Welcoming the proximity talks, GRRC spokesperson, independent nationalist
councillor Breandán MacCionnaith, told An Phoblacht that the residents
``will approach the talks with an open mind''. He added that the reality was
that previous proximity talks in 1996 and 1998 had failed to generate any
new ideas for resolving the issue.
Last week at a packed public meeting Garvaghy residents sent out the clear
message that in light of the harassment, intimidation and violence directed
against their community by loyalists over the last 10 months that there
would be no Orange march on the Garvaghy Road this year.
MacCionnaith described any formula of solutions that involved any such
march as ``unrealistic''.
He told An Phoblacht that the proximity talks planned for next week mean
that the next round of Trimble/local elected representatives talks planned
for tomorrow - which Orange Order members have boycotted - were unlikely to
add anything. He said that only one process should be focused upon. The
GRRC spokesperson was also adamant that the Trimble meetings had generated
``no suggestions, no proposals put forward by Unionists''.
As we go to press - the decision announced this week by the Parades
Commission to allow a junior Orange march on to the edge of the Garvaghy
Road this Saturday is being challenged by the GRRC in a high court judicial
review. Last year, nationalists living at the lower end of the Garvaghy
Road were attacked by loyalist supporters of the Orange Order during the
march and the RUC was criticised for attacking a peaceful residents'
protest. During the RUC attack on nationalist residents, a number of local
people and a press photographer were injured by the RUC's indiscriminate
firing of plastic bullets.
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