Drumcree march standoff: protesters and Orange Order both vow to stay ‘as long as it takes’

A protest sign about the Orange Order march down Garvaghy Road. Photograph: Nadia Caimi/JNA/ZUMA Press Wire/ShutterstockView image in fullscreenA protest sign about the Orange Order march down Garvaghy Road. Photograph: Nadia Caimi/JNA/ZUMA Press Wire/ShutterstockDrumcree march standoff: protesters and Orange Order both vow to stay ‘as long as it takes’As members of Orange Lodge No 1 gather and residents occupy Garvaghy Road, each side speaks of grievances that go back decades and centuries

Half a mile of countryside separates Drumcree parish church and Garvaghy Road. You can walk it in 15 minutes, listening to birdsong. The protesters gathered at each end, however, speak of grievances that go back decades and centuries to explain why a dispute once thought settled has returned to torment Northern Ireland.

Up on the hill at Drumcree this week, Paul, a 64-year-old Orangeman who declined to give his surname, said for too long he and his brethren had been denied the right to parade along a traditional route that would honour Protestant forefathers who fell at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the Somme in 1916.

“The people of Garvaghy have nothing to fear from 35 mostly elderly gentlemen. We’re not out to cause fear or offence to anybody. We just want the rule of law to be applied.” It was a shame, he said, that Garvaghy’s Catholic residents were beholden to “militant voices”.

View image in fullscreenA police vehicle parked near Drumcree parish church. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The GuardianFellow members of Portadown district Orange Lodge No 1 – once dubbed the “Vatican of Orangeism” – take turns staffing a tent filled with supplies. Some wear union jack stickers. How long will they stay? “As long as it takes,” said Paul.

The mood at Garvaghy Road, also bedecked with tents, was equally determined. “It’s not about 35 men walking down this road, it’s about what they represent – sectarian domination and triumphalism,” said Tomás Óg McKinney, 57. “How long will we stay? As long as it takes. We’ll be having our Christmas dinner here if we have to – turkey sandwiches.”

Dessie Trainor, 65, said the road, bedecked with Irish flags and republican symbols, must remain free of Orangemen. “Loyalists murdered my mother in 1975. That’s the history of this place and they want to march through it, and through us.”

View image in fullscreenDessie Trainor at the Garvaghy Road protest. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The GuardianBreandán Mac Cionnaith, the head of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition, is a former IRA bomber with a reputation for stubbornness.

Talks to end the dispute foundered on Friday, raising the spectre of a prolonged crisis that has already poisoned public discourse and put a question mark over power-sharing at Stormont between the Democratic Unionist party and Sinn Féin.

Earlier in the week, the secretary of state, Chris Bryant, spoke of a “tantalisingly close deal” between residents and the Orange Order, an expression of optimism at odds with the dispute’s history of entrenched positions and refusal to compromise.

On Friday, Bryant said deadlock remained. “We’ve discussed a wide range of options, including mediation, including an option where the right to march was respected but wasn’t exercised, including an option where there was a final march and no further applications for marches into the future, and we’ve not managed to come to agreement on any of all that.” The situation, he said, was between a “rock and a hard place”.

Police, meanwhile, launched what they called a “large-scale investigation” into events last Sunday when Sinn Féin’s first minister, Michelle O’Neill, and the party leader, Mary Lou McDonnald, joined throngs of residents and supporters and urged them to block a legally sanctioned parade.

O’Neill said she understood the law but chose to “stand in solidarity” with residents. Gavin Robinson, the DUP leader, said there must be consequences for “people who are law makers who are acting as law breakers”.

View image in fullscreenA sticker on Garvaghy Road expresses opposition to Orange Order parades. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The GuardianSome analysts say the crisis contains electoral calculation – that the DUP and Sinn Féin hope a rallying call will distract voters from party scandals and failures in office – and that the result will be another collapse of the executive which cripples devolved government.

However, in recent days both parties dialled down the rhetoric in a dispute that has left many in Northern Ireland anxious and bewildered. On Friday, 480 people from a Protestant background signed a joint letter calling for an end to the impasse.

Each side at Drumcree insists it is the victim of the other’s intolerance.

Orangemen marched through the area since the early 1800s before houses with Catholics started lining parts of the route, said Nigel Dawson, the Orange Order’s district master. “Garvaghy is not a toll road or a motorway where people can say go down it or do not go down it. All roads in Northern Ireland are open to all citizens. The tradition has to be respected and the law has to be enforced.”

View image in fullscreenNigel Dawson, the Portadown Orange Order district master, outside Drumcree church. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The GuardianThe rule of law and this corner of County Armagh parted ways in the mid-1990s when the annual Orange Lodge march in July turned into a showdown with Garvaghy Road’s Catholic residents, triggering pitched battles between loyalists and police that fanned sectarian violence.

Police eventually established authority in 1998 – months after the Good Friday agreement – by blocking the parade in accordance with a ruling from a nascent Parades Commission, which was set up to adjudicate on marches.

The Orange Order acquiesced to subsequent prohibitions and staged only symbolic protests each July, a 28-year limbo that led most people in Northern Ireland to conclude the issue was settled even though the Orangemen continued to make regular petitions to march, some with the help of the loyalist activist Jamie Bryson.

Procedural blunders by the Parades Commission and a series of legal rulings released the genie last week by granting permission for a scaled-down march. Police stopped the march to avert clashes with those blocking the road.

The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Jon Boutcher, must not let nationalists flout the law, said Dawson. “For 52 Sundays, for 28 years, he has vigorously policed a negative determination. And the one time there’s a positive determination, he’s not vigorously policing it.”

A legal bid by residents to overturn the Parade Commission decision will be heard on Monday. Regardless of what happens in court, there must be no parade, said McKinney. “OK we’re breaking the law, but for now it’s our only option. We’re a peaceful community standing on our own road.”

Another protester, Grainne Milligan, said loyalist paramilitaries murdered her cousin, Michael McGoldrick, a taxi driver, in 1998. “Everyone here is doing their bit,” she said. “I don’t want that trauma to be passed down to another generation.”