This week Jamie Bryson was happily repeating a line he first delivered to Orange Order supporters in Portadown early on Monday morning.
“Either the Portadown District goes down [the Garvaghy Road] or the Executive goes down,” he said.
Avowedly opposed in his politics to the Belfast Agreement, the 1998 deal underpinning Northern Ireland’s peace process, Bryson would consider either outcome a terrific result.
That declaration seemed a trite pompous but, for a period on Monday, it seemed he might get his wish regardless of whether or not the Orangemen paraded along the Garvaghy Road.
RM Block
DUP MP for Upper Bann Carla Lockhart, who at times accompanied Bryson at the landmark Church of Ireland church on Drumcree hill, warned of “profound consequences” if the parade did not get through, which some interpreted as a DUP threat to quit the Northern Executive.
Equally, if the PSNI forced the parade through the road, there was a real concern Sinn Féin would walk from the North’s powersharing government.
Later on Monday wiser counsel began to prevail, with the new Ulster Unionist Party leader Jon Burrows warning, in a possible implicit reference to Bryson and Lockhart, that “we don’t need leaders coming on the radio panning the police, criticising the chief constable, and wanting to bring our institutions down”.
How will the Drumcree standoff end?
Shortly thereafter the DUP seemed to retreat from the precipice with suggestions of a graduated series of responses if the parade did not happen rather than the collapse of Stormont.
But it is still touch and go how this will pan out politically.
[ The Irish Times view on the Drumcree decision: reopening old woundsOpens in new window ]
It remains a crisis that threatens Stormont and once again the unelected Bryson is front, back and centre to the drama. In the Assembly on Tuesday Sinn Féin MLA Pat Sheehan described Bryson as a “buck idiot” who was “calling the shots” and swinging the DUP “around by the tail”.
Bryson, who also has a tendency towards non-parliamentary language equally as robust as Sheehan’s, is no buck idiot but he does wield quite extraordinary influence within unionism and loyalism.
He has a law degree and was part of the legal team for the Portadown Orangemen that exposed the procedural screw-up by the Parades Commission that ultimately, and after legal challenges, led to permission being granted for the parade – and reactivated a dispute that most people thought had been averted.
At press conferences Portadown Orangemen happily deferred to Bryson whenever journalists asked legal questions.
He is only 36 but has been hitting the headlines since he was 19. From Donaghadee on the Ards Peninsula in Co Down he first came to prominence in 2009 when he acted as spokesman for Bangor loyalists unhappy that funding for an Eleventh Night bonfire was withdrawn.
Then, in 2012, he was centre stage again, representing loyalists infuriated by a Belfast City Council decision to limit to about 20 days the flying of the union flag over City Hall and other civic buildings, instead of all year round as was previously the case.
That decision struck a raw emotional nerve within loyalism that led to riots, protests and disruption.
Bryson became more familiar to journalists in 2013 when he was frequently seen on the margins of talks hosted by US diplomat Richard Haass aimed at resolving flags, parades and legacy matters.
It seemed uncertain how these talks would end but Bryson was telling anyone who would listen that the negotiations were doomed to failure.
And he was right, later confiding that he was so confident of the outcome because he was being secretly briefed on the talks by some DUP and Ulster Unionist politicians.
No one could figure how and why this slight-framed then 23-year-old with a distinctive lisp could exert such clout – but clout he had.
Despite accusation from nationalists, he says he is not a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) but, as the saying goes, acknowledges he is familiar with its thinking.
He believes the IRA were terrorists but the UVF were not, partly justifying that position by the comment that Sinn Féin contrariwise would see the UVF as terrorists but “the IRA as freedom fighters”.
He has been the subject of numerous death threats, telling The Irish Times that the last thing he wants is a return to violence, not least because “I imagine I would be a target, if things like that were to transpire again”.
His next big battleground was Brexit and the Irish Sea border consequences that flowed from the referendum, which Bryson believes undermines Northern Ireland’s union with Britain.
His goal in life is to prevent a united Ireland. He said he would not accept the result if there was a vote for a united Ireland in a Border poll, although he was non-specific about how he would act in the event of such a vote.
The most striking example of his influence and his connections was in January 2024 when the then DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson held a closed meeting with his party to persuade them to re-enter the Northern Executive after yet another period of suspension, this time over the Irish Sea border.
Somehow Bryson, who obviously wasn’t present, managed to live tweet on social media website X the internal discussions as they happened minute by minute.
It was suspected he or somebody in the DUP on his behalf had bugged the meeting, earning him the sobriquet “the man behind the wire”.
He has Catholic friends, most notably the former attorney general John Larkin, who is a sort of legal mentor to Bryson.
But, as again illustrated these recent days, he wants no compromise with nationalists and the Garvaghy residents.
As he said in the past: “I am contemptuous of nationalism as an idea, as an ideology. I reject it and I fight against it.”
