The decision by the Northern Ireland Parades Commission to allow the Orange Order to march down the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road for the first time since 1997 opens up old wounds and runs serious risks. Concern from the Irish Government is well-placed. In a statement it said that it does not want to see a return to the divisions of the past. This is precisely the danger.
Assuming the march does now go ahead – a legal challenge is to be heard on Saturday – the consequences are deeply concerning. It will, most certainly, polarise the communities in Portadown and cause needless anger and distress. The wider consequences are unpredictable, but could be far-reaching. It will be a test of all of the parties to keep an already shaky Stormont operational in the wake of the bitterness which the decision will unleash. And the risk of knock-on violence is real.
The decision of the Parades Commission follows a High Court judgment in Belfast in August, which quashed a ruling by the Parades Commission to stop the July march from passing down the Garvaghy Road, as has been the case since 1998. The decision, following an appeal by a member of the Orange Order, resulted from a procedural error by the commission, which said that it would not influence future decisions.
The question, then, is why did it make the determination this time to allow the parade to proceed down the Garvaghy Road – having refused it for so many years – albeit on the conditions that it involve 35 people, with no supporters lining the route and no bands. Its reasoning is not persuasive and nor is its advice that neither side should see this decision as a victory or a defeat.
RM Block
By allowing the parade to proceed, it has risked reawakening a dispute which was one of the nastiest and most divisive of the later years of the Troubles.
The parade has a deeply troubled history, notably in the late 1990s, following a decision by the RUC to ban the Orange Order from the Garvaghy Road in 1995, leading to a lengthy stand-off.
Eventually a compromise led to a silent parade down the route, but further trouble erupted in subsequent years, particularly in 1998 following a decision by the then newly-constituted Parades Commission to ban the march. In the resulting violence, three Catholic children died in a petrol bomb attack in Ballymoney, Co Antrim, just months after the Belfast Agreement had been signed.
As a result of the Parades Commission decision, Northern Ireland is now in a state of heightened tension. There is a sense of unnecessarily being dragged back to a time of community fear and apprehension.
Leaders on both sides now have a heavy responsibility to try to limit the damage from this perplexing decision.
