When reports first emerged via social media suggesting that the Orange Order was proposing to use the GAA’s All-Ireland football final as justification for a march along a hugely sensitive route in Portadown, many people wrongly concluded that an online hoax had been perpetrated.
It was soon confirmed that Portadown LOL No 1 had indeed made just such a formal application to the Parades Commission which specifically cited Armagh’s appearance in the showpiece match against Galway at Croke Park in Dublin on Sunday.
Bemused observers were then able to read an official Orange statement on the issue, largely drawn up without punctuation, the tone of which was best captured by an opening sentence including the following verbatim phrase: “...the unelected quango set up by a Labour government in 1998 the ‘Parades Commission’ and the PSNI, backed up by 15 Secretary of State’s for Northern Ireland.”
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If the mangled grammar is set aside, it was striking to find Orange leaders apparently unaware that the PSNI did not come into existence until 2001 and that the original rulings of the Parades Commission were enforced by the RUC.
The notorious events of the era centred on an insistence that Orangemen had an absolute right to march from Drumcree Parish Church along the overwhelmingly nationalist Garvaghy Road in Portadown, against the clearly expressed wishes of the residents of the area.
Major violence followed from 1995 onwards, with a Catholic taxi driver, Michael McGoldrick, murdered nearby in a sectarian attack by loyalists the following year at the height of the Drumcree stand-off.
It is almost beyond comprehension that Orange leaders could seriously propose a demonstration along Garvaghy Road on the basis that residents might be either attending the All-Ireland final or watching the game on television
Huge numbers of RUC officers and British soldiers forced the march through the Garvaghy Road in 1997, before another directly related loyalist outrage in 1998 resulted in the murder of three Catholic schoolboys, Richard (10), Mark (9) and Jason (8) Quinn, during the petrol bombing of their home in Ballymoney, Co Antrim.
The newly formed Parades Commission eventually banned the march during that and every subsequent year, with relative normality returning to Portadown until the intervention by the Orange Order earlier this week.
It is almost beyond comprehension that Orange leaders could seriously propose a demonstration along the Garvaghy Road this Sunday afternoon on the basis that residents might be either attending the All-Ireland final or watching the game on television.
The Parades Commission is due to consider the matter later today and there will be a firm expectation that the application will be swiftly and bluntly rejected.
Sadly, it is extremely difficult to see how the Orange Order believes that community relations in Portadown can improve as long as it engages in provocative and entirely futile gestures of this kind.
