Drumcree in 2024: Top Orangeman says 'the status quo cannot prevail - it was wrong then and it is wrong now'

The new £50,000-per-year chairwoman of the commission is Dr Evelyn Collins CBE, who was appointed by the government and took up her post on January 1.

She replaced Scottish Anglican cleric Rev Graham Forbes, who took up the role in January 2021.

The Drumcree standoff has been a fixture of Northern Irish culture since the mid-to-late 1990s.

To this day, every Sunday a group of marchers continue to gather – as they have done hundreds upon hundreds of weekends in a row since 1997 – in a symbolic effort to complete their original banned parade from Drumcree church outside Portadown into the town itself, via the Catholic-dominated Garvaghy Road.

These symbolic non-marches do not result in disorder; they follow a well-rehearsed pattern whereby the Orangemen typically attend a church service then walk to the bottom of the country road where a handful of waiting police inform them they cannot proceed.

District Master Dawson said that meeting the new commission chairwoman to discuss this long-running weekly protest is “a priority”, but no date has yet been fixed.

But does he think it could really bring about a change to the decades-old deadlock?

"There needs to be,” he said.

"It was the wrong decision 25 years ago, and it's still wrong.

"We're there every Sunday and it has to change. The status quo can't be allowed to remain."

The Garvaghy Road residents will say their objections haven't changed either.

"I can't answer for them,” he said.

"I know any of the talks processes we were involved in, they never came to the table and never raised any objections to us, so I'm not really aware of what their issues are.

"It's still unknown to us – but that's their problem. We'll be pushing for this wrong to be righted against us."

If the parade were to go ahead once, and complete its route via the Garvaghy Road, would that be the end of it?

"That'd be a decision for the district lodge as a whole,” he replied.

"We're one of the larger districts in Northern Ireland with over 850 men and that'd be a decision they would make.”

New chair Dr Collins had been the chief executive of the Equality Commission NI from 2000 to 2023 (during which time the body led its failed four-year legal battle against Ashers Bakery).

She has also been a member of the EU Commission’s Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities between Women and Men, the National Statistician’s Inclusive Data Advisory Committee, chair of Equinet (the European Network of Equality Bodies), and chair of the London-based Equal Rights Trust (which aims to ensure activist groups are “making full and effective use of equality law”, among other things).