Bryant's Drumcree Talks End Without a Solution
The Northern Ireland Secretary left the conference to hold talks at Hillsborough Castle, urging both sides to “double down on compromise” and warning that “nobody should be attending an unlawful protest”. Afterwards he conceded the obvious: “we haven’t got a solution yet.” A third attempt to walk the Garvaghy Road was stopped in the early hours of Monday by a line of police vehicles.
The standoff has become a constitutional argument rather than a parading one. The Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson accused Sinn Féin politicians who stood on the road of being “lawmakers acting as lawbreakers”, and said the stakes for Stormont “could get higher” if the Order is never able to complete the parade. From the other side Claire Hanna of the Social Democratic and Labour Party rejected the whole exercise: “Whatever the legalities, it was never politically right or morally right to do this.” The Chief Constable Jon Boutcher has been gathering evidence from the start against “whatever party” was involved, while setting a deliberately modest measure of success, that “not one hair on one head gets harmed”. The determination that started this reversed twenty-eight years of practice, cutting the parade to thirty-five men and an eight o’clock start. Mr Bryant is willing to keep talking today.