Drumcree parade dispute: Speaker at Westminster urged to intervene on behalf of Portadown District
Portadown Orange leaders are urging the Speaker at Westminster to intervene in the long-running Drumcree parade dispute.
With 26 years having passed since the annual July parade was permitted to walk along the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road, the local lodges believe it is time there was some official “oversight” of the Parades Commission’s decisions.
Portadown District master Nigel Dawson said the Commission – which was created by legislation at Westminster – has adopted an “unsustainable” position by granting one side in the dispute a “veto”.
The local Orange leaders had suggested that this Sunday would be the ideal time to allow the 1998 parade to be completed as it would coincide with Armagh playing in the All-Ireland gaelic football final, with the majority of the Garvaghy Road community either "away to Croke Park" or watching the game on TV.
However, in a determination issued on Thursday, the Parades Commission once again said the parade would be banned from entering the Garvaghy Road on its proposed route back to Carleton Street Orange Hall.
The parade proposal has been backed by the DUP Upper Bann MP Carla Lockhart who said: “A 10-minute church parade should be offensive to no one and especially given the circumstances in which this application has been made.”
There was serious public disorder in Portadown, and across Northern Ireland, in July 1995 in response to the parade being banned from the Garvaghy Road for the first time, and further disorder connected to the parade anniversary for several consecutive years.
Sinn Fein has described this year’s parade application as “a stunt designed to increase tensions and cause division”.
Mr Dawson said the repeated refusal of the Garvaghy Road residents to engage with local Orange representatives, and the “veto” they are being facilitated to exercise “is a position that is unsustainable moving forward”.
Mr Dawson said that a meeting has been arranged with the new chair of the Parades Commission, and that a higher authority is also being approached.
"We have been in touch previously, and we will be again, with the Speaker’s office in Westminster, because the Commission is a quango set up by legislation at Westminster.
"So we are in communication with the Speaker’s office regarding the lack of oversight of the Commission and its work, so that is ongoing at the moment," he said.
Mr Dawson added: "For the last 15 years we have always said that we will meet anybody in order to bring this to a resolution. The residents have never met us.
"Any time we have met the Commission we have always said ‘you are not an honest broker in this, you’ve given the other side a veto. So while the residents know that you’re going to say “no,” why would they do anything [but object]?’
"That is their (the residents’) position and we understand that, but the Commision is not there to provide vetoes – the Commission is there to seek resolutions.”
Responding to the Commission’s decision, Upper Bann DUP MP Carla Lockhart said: “Where is the respect for the unionist tradition? We see again the hollow words of SF when they talk about their fantasy United Ireland.
"There is no respect for unionists. It is supremacy and domination they want. The fight for equality goes on.”