Parade applications cause Portadown tensions

There have been calls for Orange Order marches to be permanently banned from the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, County Armagh after tensions over a new ‘stunt’ application to march the infamously controversial route.

Residents of the nationalist area have spoken of their relief after the Parades Commission rejected the application for a sectarian march during last weekend’s All-Ireland football final.

Portadown Orangemen wanted to parade down the Garvaghy Road from Drumcree church around the same time Armagh were due to line out against Galway in the final at Croke Park in Dublin on Sunday.

Attempts by the British government to force a sectarian parade against the wishes of the local community caused major disturbances in the late 1990s.

The dispute led to the formation of the Parades Commission, which has always rerouted the Orangemen away from the area. However, applications continue to be made and considered by the commission, bringing uncertainty, anger and fear to the local community on a regular basis.

Breandán Mac Cionnaith, of the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition, welcomed the determination, which he said had allowed people to watch the match or travel to Dublin without having to worry about their families and relatives back in the town.

“It is a common sense decision,” he said. “There’s a lot of relief in the community that the commission ruled against the parade.”

Sinn Féin councillor Paul Duffy said the Parades Commission determination was “the right decision”.

“This most recent application was a stunt, it was arrogant, insulting and derogatory and designed to increase tensions and cause division,” he said.

“The people of the Garvaghy Road have worked to foster stronger and better cross-community relations with our neighbours and have no desire to return to the divisions of the past.”

But DUP MP Carla Lockhart claimed that more young families “with no memory” of the conflicts of the 1990s meant there would be less resistance to a parade now.

Former SDLP Assembly member Dolores Kelly called the application “absolutely crazy”.

“Talk about being chancers, and for Carla to suggest that this is because of demographic change.

“If she wants to talk about demographic change she should look at the route out to the church, which is actually now through quite a built up area.”

Saying the application was “picking at old wounds,” she said not too many would forget the worst years of Drumcree when “the British army and police were there en-masse.

“There was barbed wire across the fields where there were people killed.”

The cost of processing the repeated and stress-inducing applications and the policing required for weekly ‘protests’ by the Orange Order are also becoming a sore point for nationalists.

Calling it an act of “bad faith” from the Orangemen, Ms Kelly said Lockhart would have better served her constituents by sharing her good wishes with the Armagh football team.

Ms Kelly continued: “I spoke to a senior member of the Orange Order a few years back.

“It wasn’t about just a return parade, it was about asserting a right. And Carla and others should realise that there’s no absolute right to march in any area.

“The desire of the Orange Order to march wherever they want, those days are long gone and they’re not going to be resurrected, regardless of any demographic change.”

Urgent Appeal