Britain’s Northern Ireland minister on Friday overturned a decision by local authorities that granted a permit for a Protestant parade to pass through a Catholic area and triggered a two-week standoff that raised tensions in the region.
Northern Ireland’s Parades Commission last month allowed the Orange Order to march along the Garvaghy Road, a Catholic area in the mainly Protestant town of Portadown, for the first time since parades on the route were banned in 1998. Thousands of residents and protesters stopped the parade from taking place.
A small number of Orange Order members have since remained at the start of the route, while a round-the-clock police presence has kept them separated from protesters 1.5 kilometres (1 mile) away on the footpaths of the Garvaghy Road.
Chris Bryant, Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said the region’s police chief advised him that the parade could not go ahead without a major intervention from officers, which would carry “an unacceptable risk of serious injury, disorder and a wider contagion effect.”
That official advice triggered a mechanism whereby Bryant could step in to overturn the Parades Commission’s ruling.
“I have not taken this decision lightly,” Bryant said in a statement, which also thanked the Orange Order for their peaceful and law-abiding approach throughout.
A lawyer representing Alan Hynes, a local Orange Order member, said in a statement that his client would challenge the minister’s decision in court and request that the matter be listed before a judge on Saturday.
Bryant called for all protests, rallies and demonstrations to be stood down, saying there was no excuse for a continued ratcheting up of tensions.
Annual attempts by the Orange Order to march through the area had triggered unrest across the region until the route was banned nearly three decades ago, in the same year that the Good Friday Agreement largely ended three decades of violence in Northern Ireland known as the “Troubles.”
“We don’t view it as a victory but as a starting point because there are relationships within Portadown that need to be built and rebuilt,” Breandán Mac Cionnaith, head of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition, told national broadcaster RTE.
The decision was welcomed by the Irish government and by Northern Ireland’s largest Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, whose leader in Northern Ireland Michelle O’Neill is due to be interviewed by police for taking part in the protest.
Sinn Fein’s pro-British rivals, the Democratic Unionist Party, criticised the intervention, saying it was the “direct result of (Irish) Republican agitation, mobilisation and the looming threats of potential violence.”
DUP leader Gavin Robinson said in a statement, however, that his party would not walk away from the region’s fragile devolved government, where it shares power with Sinn Fein.
(Reporting by Amanda Ferguson）
